


Saving Ourselves

by Scouts_Mockingbird



Series: Saving Souls AU [3]
Category: Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, F/M, High School Reunion, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's the Nineties Now, Road Trip, Teenaged Angst Bullshit, Witch Heather Chandler, With Even More Ghosts, ghost au, ghost hunter jd, medium veronica
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-03-08 21:36:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 47,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13467051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scouts_Mockingbird/pseuds/Scouts_Mockingbird
Summary: It's 1994, and JD and Veronica have returned to Westerburg to visit old friends for their high school reunion.  When JD gets an urgent call, the old team must get back together for another adventure.  What they find might be the worst evil they've faced yet, and it will take all of their skills to defeat it.





	1. Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> I'M BACK! People were so nice to me today (sending nice stuff on Tumblr, leaving great comments on my work) and it gave me the motivation I needed to get this done. I hope y'all are ready for Saving Souls Part Three! Enjoy!

JD skimmed his lips over Veronica’s throat, smirking when she hummed in response. He continued his path upwards, leaving a trail of kisses on her jaw before finally pressing his lips against hers. He tried to shift so that he could pull her closer but the narrow backseat of the car didn’t allow for much movement.

“JD,” Veronica whispered, leaning back a little, so she could look at him. “Are you just doing this to avoid what we have to do?”

His reply was murmured into the curve of her neck. “Maybe. Isn’t that what we always do?”

Making a small, disgruntled noise, Veronica pulled away so she could glare at him. “We have to go. Come on, it’s time to go, we’re already late.” Stretching up, Veronica bit his earlobe playfully, “Besides, it’s better if there’s some anticipation.”

He smiled down at her and kissed her nose before shifting his position so she could sit up and start straightening her hair and clothes. He pulled halfheartedly at his own shirt and dug his jacket off of the car floor but didn’t bother checking his appearance. It wouldn’t do much good.

They both climbed out of the car, and JD paused to admire Veronica. It had been months since he’d seen her in anything other than the clothes she wore on their hunts, and her sleek black dress was a nice change.

“You look nice.” She beat him to the compliment by half a second, and he assumed her thoughts had been along the same lines as his.

“Nice enough for _them_?” He had switched his usual coat for a leather jacket, though not much else had changed, and they were facing a tough audience.

Veronica shrugged. “Probably not, I can’t remember a time anything was good enough for them. But we’re going in anyway.”

She squared her shoulders and led the way into the familiar building. They were late for their high school reunion.

Their footsteps echoed as they walked through the empty halls, following the faint sounds of the party happening in the gym.

“It feels smaller than I remember.” JD looked around the halls as memories crowded in his head. They passed the lockers he’d been standing in front of when Heather Chandler told him he was with the Heathers. They passed the doors to the cafeteria where he’d fought Kurt and Ram on his first day at Westerburg. They passed the door leading to the boiler room where Veronica had fought him when he was possessed. They were walking the halls he had once run through with a bomb, determined to end it all.

“Five years is a long time,” Veronica whispered, reaching for his hand.

Dark thoughts evaporated when they finally entered the gym. Though the whole room fell silent at the sight of them, three figures burst through the crowd to immediately alleviate all tension.

“Heather!” Veronica surged forward to embrace her friends leaving JD to follow rather awkwardly behind.

Chandler emerged from the hug first, and stepped away from the others to greet JD. It had been months since he’d seen her. “Heather, you cut your hair!”

Heather tossed her now shoulder-length hair. “You didn’t.” She reached up to tug on the end of his admittedly too long hair.

“We’ve been busy, I haven’t bothered to cut it. Yours looks nice though, really.” He and Chandler were so used to exchanging barbs with one another they often found it necessary to specify when they weren’t being sarcastic.

“I wish I could say the same about yours.”

Rolling his eyes, he turned to greet the other two Heathers, starting with Duke, one of very few people in the world he would actually hug. She pulled away first, practically bouncing on her toes with enthusiasm. “How was North Dakota? Did you find anything?”

Heather Duke had been coordinating their hunts from Sherwood, and anyone who tried to get in contact with them, called Heather first. Without her, they wouldn’t have found half the jobs they’d done in the five years since leaving Sherwood. She was the only person besides the two of them who knew everything they did. Even Heather Chandler didn’t keep track of all their jobs.

Their most recent job had been a swath of possessions in a small town in North Dakota. “It went well. Turns out it was one loose spirit body hopping. There was one death before we got there, but it could have been a lot worse.”

“How’d Veronica take it?” Duke asked, lowering her voice so as not to be overheard by the girl in question.

JD shook his head, “Not well. She always wants to do these with no deaths at all, but sometimes…” He trailed off; they both knew what he meant.

“What, just because I’m not your favorite means I don’t get a hello?” Heather McNamara demanded with a smile, reaching up to squeeze his shoulder.

She was another of the privileged few, so he pulled her into a quick hug. “Hi, Heather, how are you?” Though he and Veronica made a point of seeing all of the Heathers whenever they were in Ohio, they rarely spoke to McNamara while they were traveling.

“I’m great! Actually, I have big news,” Heather held out her hand and it took JD a minute to register the meaning of the enormous diamond ring on her finger.

“Holy shit, congratulations!” He actually hugged her a second time, something unprecedented in their six years of friendship. “I didn’t even know you were seeing someone.”

McNamara smiled, “We didn’t date for very long. Actually, you know him! Do you remember Peter Dawson? He was on yearbook with Veronica and Heather.”

JD did faintly remember a short kid with reddish hair, though he couldn’t recall ever speaking to him. Another memory occurred to him almost at the same time. “Didn’t everyone think he was gay?”

Veronica glared at him and smacked his arm. “JD!”

McNamara flushed, but leveled her own glare in his direction. “Our situation works for us. You know, not everyone wants what you have.” She gestured between him and Veronica.

“I can’t imagine why not,” JD threw an arm around Veronica’s shoulders and smiled down at her. “But I’m happy for you Heather, really, I am.”

He hadn’t ever thought of it before, but McNamara’s decision made sense. Looking back, she hadn’t dated much at all since they’d graduated, though she had many friends and went out often.

“What about you two?” Duke asked with a mischievous smile. “Any thought to finally getting married and settling down?”

Almost in unison, JD and Veronica snorted. JD answered for them both. “No.”

“Why not?” McNamara whined, she loved any and all weddings, but especially the ones that required one of the rings that she sold for a living.

“We’ve told you,” Veronica rolled her eyes, “Neither of us believe in God or the government, so a wedding for us would just be a party with our friends, and we can do that whenever we want.”

Desperate to avoid the usual melee of complaints from McNamara, JD turned to Chandler, “So, Heather, are you seeing anyone? You never mention your personal life.” Chandler was biology teacher at Westerburg, and she loved it. Talk of her work consumed nearly every conversation they’d had since she’d started in September.

“Well…” Chandler appeared to be unsuccessfully fighting the grin that was spreading across her face. “Actually, my girlfriend just moved in with me.”

“Wait…” JD paused and ran back over that statement. “Girlfriend?”

Chandler turned to stare directly into his eyes. “I’m a lesbian, Jason.”

There was a long pause as realization dawned. “Oooooooh.”

Veronica frowned up at him. “JD… How could you not have known that? She dated Betty for all of senior year; _they went to prom together.”_

A lot of things suddenly made sense. “Wow, I feel like an idiot.”

“You look like one, too.” Duke patted him sympathetically on the shoulder. “We all assumed you knew.”

Chandler laughed as well, “Anyway, ignoring JD’s incredible stupidity, Laura teaches at the elementary school and she’s… she’s just so great.” Heather’s broad, almost silly smile was as sweet as it was uncharacteristic, before it grew serious. “We have to be careful about everything though, we could lose our jobs if people start to suspect.”

“Most people are idiots,” JD assured her, “You’ll be fine, and if something happens…” He trailed off and gave her a dangerous smirk, allowing her to imagine whatever implications she wanted. Veronica would disapprove, but he would happily commit a couple crimes if it meant Heather could keep the job she loved.

Deciding now was the time for a tactful topic change, he turned to Duke. “How’s my bike? Are you taking care of her?”

Duke grimaced, “I’m going to ignore the fact that you call it a ‘her’. But yeah, it’s great. I’m the coolest librarian Westerburg has ever seen; I come to school on a motorcycle.”

“I’m sure the boys _love_ that,” McNamara said.

“Most of them are too intimidated by it to speak to me.” Duke sounded a little proud about that.

“If one of them steps out of line, they’ll regret it,” JD muttered.

Duke leaned back in alarm, “JD, you wouldn’t kill a high schooler—“ She stopped abruptly as they all remembered at the same time that JD had killed high schoolers.

Two of them had pictures on a table in the corner, with a sign underneath reading “In remembrance”.

“So, does anyone want some wine?” Chandler said too brightly.

A chorus of agreements sounded as they all shoved away dark memories from senior year. Veronica reached out to squeeze McNamara’s hand.

They overdid it a little bit. In a desperate attempt to be happy at this ridiculous farce of a reunion— where they were all the subject of as much gossip and speculation as they had been when they were teenagers— they drank far more than necessary.

“So,” Chandler started, slurring and tossing an arm over JD’s shoulders, “Do Veronica’s parents still hate you?”

JD barked out a laugh, “Veronica’s parents think I kidnapped her. They saw this thing on Sixty Minutes about cults and they decided I must have brainwashed their precious genius daughter.”

Veronica rolled her eyes, “Never mind my books and the hundreds of times I’ve told them I love JD. They refuse to believe this is the life I actually want.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” McNamara bounced up and down, eyes lit up with excitement, “Maybe they would like it better if you got _married_!”

“NO!” JD and Veronica snapped in unison.

McNamara sulked and looked ready to protest, but Duke’s literary enthusiasm caught up with the conversation and she interrupted. “Have you written anything new, Veronica? The girls would be so excited if you were coming out with a new book.”

JD smiled and admired Veronica as she described a vague plot for the next book in her series. She had written a couple of chapter books for teenagers about a high school girl who could talk to ghosts. They were loosely based off of her own diaries. Duke’s father had given them to a friend of his who was a publisher, and everyone involved had been shocked at how popular they became. Her books had become their main source of income, since ghost hunting didn’t pay very well.

He took another long drink as she finished explaining. The wine was cheap but effective, and even he was starting to feel fairly buzzed. Veronica was long gone, Chandler was gushing about Laura, which meant she was probably very drunk as well. Duke and McNamara were both a little unsteady on their feet.

They had to walk home. About halfway to Duke’s house, McNamara started singing a Madonna song at the top of her lungs, and none of them even tried to stop her.   When they finally arrived, McNamara passed out on the couch almost immediately. JD and Veronica stumbled their way up to his old bedroom while Chandler called Laura to come get her.

 

JD woke up the next morning to Heather Duke shaking his shoulder roughly. “JD! JD, wake up! We missed a call. I forgot to check the phones last night and I missed a call.”

The panic in her voice was enough to shake JD out of his groggy, slightly hungover fog. “What is it, Heather? How serious?” Heather manned the phone for JD and Veronica, in case someone called asking for help. She was also the only person who knew where they were and how to get in touch with them at any given time.

“I think… I think you should just listen to it.”

Veronica stirred slightly. “What’s going on?”

“We got a call at some point yesterday—“ JD started to explain when Veronica sat up, more or less fully awake. She went with them to the answering machine in Heather’s office.

The voice on the recording was familiar and alarming. “Jason, I’m in Sunnydale, California, and I need you to call Alice.”

“That’s all there is,” Heather reached down to play it again, “It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I thought it was—“

“Yeah, it’s my dad.” JD heaved a sigh. He hadn’t seen his father in two years. They’d been good years.

Seeing his frustration, Veronica reached for his hand. “What does it mean? I mean… it’s not a lot to go on.”

“It’s a duress code. We set it up a long time ago in case either of us ever got captured or something. If he’s calling me and saying that, it means something really bad happened and he wants my help.”

“How bad?” Veronica asked.

“I’m not sure, but knowing him, the world is ending.”

Veronica sighed, “Not again.”


	2. Planning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'm so sorry for the fact that this chapter isn't great. It's a little short and the cutoff place is weird but I won't have time to write for a few days and I didn't want to leave you hanging. Bear with me I promise this will get better! Enjoy!

They all trouped out of Duke’s house to see Chandler and talk about what to do. Veronica knew JD wanted to just go and get this over with, but she thought it was smart to weigh their options. Bud Dean wasn’t trustworthy, and Veronica wasn’t about to drive across the country just to help a man who’d spent years hurting JD.

Chandler was already downstairs when they got there, looking irritated and clutching a cup of coffee. “This had better be good.”

“My dad called last night.” JD said, and Chandler immediately leaned forward. “He needs me to come to California.”

Heather paused, and even Veronica was surprised by JD’s brief answer. They both waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. Finally, Duke pulled out the tape from the answering machine. “Here, Heather, just listen to it.”

Chandler listened to the tape, then wordlessly played it over again. After a third time, she looked up. “That sounds like a trap.”

“I agree with Heather,” Duke added quickly, “I don’t think you should go.”

Veronica wasn’t sure what to think. She certainly hated Bud, but she didn’t really think he would trick JD like this. He didn’t have a reason to, did he?

But JD shook his head. “He wouldn’t use that code. Not ever. It’s not nothing.”

“Okay,” Chandler said, “So why don’t you just call Alice and tell her to deal with it?”

JD pinched the bridge of his nose, “Alice… Heather, Alice was my mom’s name. That’s why it’s our duress code, because unless things were really bad, he wouldn’t say her name. Not ever. I _know_ that something is really wrong, and I’m going to California to see what it is.”

“And I’m going with you.” Veronica reached for his hand as she said it.

He looked down at her, confused. “Ronnie, you hate my dad, why would you want to go?”

She shrugged. “I go where you go.”

“I’m going too.” Chandler said, glaring at them and daring either of them to argue.  

JD stared both of them, and Veronica was ready for him to protest, but before he had the chance, Duke spoke up. “If Heather’s going, I’m going.”

Ignoring JD’s shocked silence, Veronica nodded. “Well, then we better ask Heather too, she’d hate to be left behind. Heather, do you mind if I use your phone?”

“I’ll call her,” Duke interrupted, “I know her number.” She vanished into the kitchen.

“You don’t have to do this,” JD whispered, sounding a little choked up.

It was no secret that they all hated Bud Dean. Chandler and Veronica especially, after they’d had to heal him when he’d crawled into Veronica’s room, beaten bloody because of one of Bud’s rules. Nothing he’d done to help them in Indiana had changed the situation.

Chandler just shrugged; she wasn’t one to explain her motivations. For Veronica, there had never been any question. She would go wherever JD went, regardless of who they were going to see.

“I’m serious,” JD insisted when he was met with more silence. “I know how much you hate him, and I get it. Fuck, most of the time I hate him too. I don’t understand why you would do this for him.”

Chandler rolled her eyes. “We aren’t doing it for him, dumbass.” She walked away in the direction of the kitchen, leaving Veronica alone with JD.

“We’re doing it for you, JD.” She had more to say, but instead she pulled him down into a kiss.

He wound his hands into her hair, and she leaned even closer to him. A small cough alerted them to the fact that they weren’t alone.

A woman about their age was standing at the bottom of the stairs staring at them in confusion. She looked tired, her short brown hair still rumpled with sleep, and her eyes squinted in the bright light of the living room. “Hi…” She seemed no more than slightly confused by the strangers making out in her house early in the morning.

“Hi,” Veronica tried for a cheerful smile, “I’m Veronica, this is JD.”

The woman—Veronica assumed it was Laura—nodded. “I figured. Heather said you guys were… like that.”

Veronica couldn’t help exchanging a guilty glance with JD before she changed the subject. “Heather is in the kitchen, if you were looking for her.”

“She’d better be making coffee,” Laura muttered as she made her way into the kitchen, bumping into Heather Duke who was on her way out.

“Heather is on her way, she’s coming too.” Duke flopped onto the couch. “I wish we knew more about this whole situation, I don’t like going in blind.”

A slow smile spread across JD’s face, “Well, who do we know who could help us with that? I think he owes us a favor.”

Veronica’s smile matched his. “Michael!”

Michael Mell was the other essential part of their operation. Heather Duke answered their phones and told them where to go, but Michael’s skill with computers had alerted them to situations they never would have heard about otherwise. After his brush with death in high school, he’d become fascinated with ghosts, and combined with his interest in computers, he’d become one of the most active occult researchers in America. Whenever a particularly interesting or unusual case caught his attention, he told JD and Veronica about it. There was very little ghost activity that went on without Michael at least hearing about it, and what information he didn’t have at the ready, he had access to. He was an absolutely irreplaceable ally. And he was their friend.

“We can give him a call once we’re ready to set off.”

Just then, a flustered Heather McNamara burst through the door. “Don’t leave without me!”

They all turned to stare at her. “No one is leaving without you, Heather. We still need to pack and figure out where we’re going. You have plenty of time.” Duke’s practical attitude seemed to calm McNamara, and she came over to sit on the couch next to her.

Chandler reentered the room, holding a cup of coffee. Veronica pointed at it. “Is there enough of that to go around?”

“It’s in the kitchen.” Chandler gestured vaguely behind her and made her way to a chair in the living room.

JD stood up and walked out without a word and Veronica assumed he was getting coffee for both of them.

Chandler looked over the assembled group, “We can’t all go. Someone has to stay here and answer the phone and make sure we check in.”

All eyes darted to McNamara, who was the least involved in the hunts that JD and Veronica went on. She glared back at them. “So you want me to stay behind because I’m your least favorite?”

They were all quick to reassure her, but she cut them off. “Don’t lie about it. Veronica and Heather are both magic, JD and Heather lived together for a year, and you all have your ghosts and stuff.” She paused, and her anger flickered into something sadder. “And then there’s me.”

JD had returned, holding two mugs and watching the whole scene unfold. While the girls scrambled to find something to say, JD broke in calmly. “Then who would fix the car?”

Silence fell as all eyes turned back to Heather McNamara. “What?”

JD shrugged and handed Veronica her mug. “That trip we all took the summer after senior year, you kept that shitty camper going, and we made it across the country and back. This is going to be a long trip, we might need someone who can take care of the car.”

“But who’s going to handle coordinating things here?” Chandler asked, her practicality overpowering her desire to be nice to McNamara. Veronica couldn’t help agreeing with her. As much as she wanted to relive the glory days of their summer road trip, having someone at home giving them information was essential.

“I could do it, if somebody tells me what the fuck is going on,” Laura suggested, emerging from wherever she’d been hiding to eavesdrop.

Chandler’s jaw dropped in horror, but JD nodded, satisfied. “Perfect, Heather tell Laura…. Wait… What doesn’t she know?”

Veronica saw guilt flit over Chandler’s pretty features as she looked down at the ground. “Most of it.”

“Oh.” JD looked at Veronica, and she recognized his _please help me_ expression, but she didn’t have anything to say. He went on unsupported. “Well, Heather, you have to tell her eventually. This isn’t something you keep from someone you love.”

“You’re one to talk!” Heather snapped, glaring between JD and Veronica.

JD glared right back at her, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, right, so you told Veronica about the murders on the first date?” Heather’s steel gray eyes were narrowed at JD, and took a step back to stay out of the path of her rage.

“Murders!” Laura was staring between JD and Heather, pale and shocked. “What murders? Heather, what the hell is happening?”

Chandler gestured to a chair. “You’d better sit down.”

 

“So…” Laura had been quiet while they all contributed to the story of their senior year, but now that they were done, Veronica could see she was bursting with questions. “Ghosts are real. That’s… different. And Sherwood is special because there are more ghosts here, which means that witches and mediums are born here more than other places?” Everyone nodded. “Okay, and Heather is a real witch, she can actually do spells that really work?”

“I mostly make potions, and I use plants for healing. I can heal without them, but I prefer not to. Laura, I’m really sorry, I know this is a lot to take in.”

Laura shook her head, “I’m okay, actually. Some of this makes a lot of sense, although I need some time to get my head around it. You know I’m into your witchcraft Heather, I just had no idea it really, you know, worked.”

“It does.” Veronica turned around and lifted the back of her shirt, revealing a couple of faded pink scars she’d gotten running away from the field when it blew up. “Heather healed these; they’d be a lot worse if she hadn’t.”

Laura smiled shyly at Heather. “That’s impressive.”

Heather Chandler blushed. The last time Veronica had seen her blush was when she’d been dating Betty; it was a sure sign that she was at least a little bit in love.

But Veronica could see that JD was losing patience. “So you’ll handle the phones while we’re gone? And if anything happens, go to the library at the high school, it’s really well protected.”

Laura nodded, “I can take care of it, don’t worry. I hope everything is alright with your dad.”

Veronica was probably the only person who noticed that JD flinched a little when Laura mentioned Bud. She reached over and put her hand on his back. They had become so close after living the way they did for five years that they understood all of each other’s quirks and habits. It was as close to mind reading as they could get.

Leaning slightly into her hand, JD nodded. “Thank you.”

“We all probably need time to pack, Heather, we’ll be back in a couple hours to get you. Pack light, we won’t be there long and you aren’t trying to impress people.”

Chandler rolled her eyes, “As if I have to try.”

“I mean it, our car is pretty small, and we have a lot of gear, plus all of us packed in there, it’s going to be tight. Don’t bring anything you don’t absolutely need.”

“Wait!” McNamara jumped up eagerly, “We don’t have to take your car, we can take the van!”

They all stared at her, and Veronica really hoped Heather wasn’t talking about the giant camper they’d taken on their senior year trip. It had been slow and required constant maintenance just to run normally. If they took that, it would take a week to get to California.

McNamara moved over to the window and pulled open the curtain, revealing a rather ugly gray van. “I bought it cheap and rebuilt the engine and stuff, so it’ll run fine for the whole trip. Plus it’s big enough for everyone to be comfortable.”

“It doesn’t have windows.” Duke pointed out. “Does it even have seats?”

McNamara nodded, ignoring her friend’s reluctance. “I nailed in some cushions so it’s totally comfortable back there.”

Veronica shrugged, “Okay, great. Heather, go get packed and we’ll all meet back here in two hours.”

They all trouped out the door to begin the process of getting ready for their latest adventure. Veronica had been hoping for a bit of a rest with JD while they were in Sherwood, but they could always do that another time. Their lifestyle allowed for very flexible vacation time.

“Veronica!”

She turned sharply, and saw her parents, still driving the same dated sedan they’d always had. Her mother was leaning out the window and waving at her, her face anxious. “Veronica, come here! We need to speak with you!”

Veronica turned to find JD already at her side, ready to support her in whatever way she needed. His presence was a relief. She didn’t think she could face her parents alone. They walked together towards the car.

“Don’t you dare bring that horrible boy anywhere near us!”

So much for backup. Veronica squeezed JD’s hand before putting her chin up and going to meet her parents on her own.


	3. Sleepy Town

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have literally no time to write notes, I love you all, here's a chapter. Enjoy!

“Mom. Dad.” Veronica knew she sounded rude, but couldn’t really help it. Every time she and JD returned to Sherwood, her parents made an appearance and demanded she leave JD and come home. Her refusal to do so had caused a rift to form between them, and—unable to blame their daughter for the situation—they had decided JD was the devil and he’d brainwashed her or was threatening her, or any of the million things they’d seen on the news and decided must be what was wrong with their daughter.

“Veronica, sweetie,” Her mother’s smile was as sickeningly sweet and forced as her voice. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

One-word answers were not enough to deter her parents. “Veronica, we’ve been worried about you. You never come home anymore.”

Veronica sighed. “I’m sorry that you’ve been worried. We’ve been busy and haven’t been in the area for a few months.”

Her dad, as usual, said nothing, just watched the women in his family blunder their way through another tense conversation. Her mother of course, always had something to say. “And whose decision was that? I’m sure you would have come home if _that boy_ had let you.”

They never called him JD, just _that boy_ with a certain bitter inflection that infuriated Veronica. “JD doesn’t _let_ me do things. We decide where we go and what we do together. We’re a team.”

“But you aren’t married? Or have you left us out of that part of your life as well?” Her mother’s lips pursed, and she glared at JD, who was hovering just out of earshot, ready to back Veronica up if she needed it.

“JD and I aren’t married, and we don’t want to be.” She was a little sick of people asking about this. They weren’t married because there was no point. They had saved each other’s lives, had done the impossible together, and had made promises to each other that meant more than any vows said before a priest ever could. After all of that, why would a wedding be necessary?

Her mother sighed, “Veronica, your father and I don’t agree with your lifestyle—“

“But it’s my life!” Veronica could feel herself getting dangerously close to snapping at her parents, “And I like it, and—“

“No, Veronica, for once you are going to hear us out! We don’t like this boy, and while we’re very proud of you for writing your books, the money isn’t enough to buy a house or raise children—“

“I don’t want those things!” She didn’t want them right then, at least, which was all she needed to explain to her parents.

Her mother wasn’t done. “You are throwing your life away, doing nothing, for some lowlife boy!”

Veronica saw JD flinch out of the corner of her eye, and all at once, her anger took over, obliterating any rational thought she might have had. “JD is not just ‘some lowlife boy’. He saved my life! And you know what else? We don’t ‘do nothing’. So maybe I am ‘throwing my life away’, but I’m doing it to help people.”

“Jim,” Her mother hissed, “Do something! She’s starting to sound like your mother.”

A bitter smile twisted onto Veronica’s face. “That makes a lot of sense. Grandma Sawyer and I have a lot in common.”

The panicked look on her parents’ faces should have been satisfying, but it left Veronica feeling hollow. Her parents thought Grandma Sawyer was crazy, had wanted to send her to a home. Veronica knew better. Like Veronica, Lydia Sawyer had been a powerful medium, capable of protecting an entire town from evil.

“Veronica…” Her mother started, finally seeming less angry, but Veronica was worried about the caution in her tone. Her mother sounded like she was talking to a wild animal. “I think you should come home. That boy may have put some ideas into your head… we’re worried about you.”

Her father finally had something to say. “We don’t like him, Veronica.”

Rolling her eyes, Veronica started to turn away. “That’s because you’re idiots.”

Insulted, her parents drove off, leaving Veronica standing by the street. JD walked up beside her and took her hand. “Are you okay? That was pretty intense.”

Veronica shook her head. “I’m alright. I wish I could tell them the truth, but they’d never believe it. If I think things are bad with them now, that would make it a lot worse.”

JD nodded and she was grateful when he changed the topic. “So, do you want to pack the weapons or the clothes?”

“You packed clothes last time, so I’ll give you a turn with the weapons. Don’t go overboard though, you’ll freak them out.”

“It’s my dad. I can never have too many weapons.” Under most circumstances, he would’ve said that as a joke, but his grim face sent shivers down Veronica’s spine. He wasn’t joking.

Veronica wasn’t sure what to make of that, but she trusted him. And secretly, Veronica wouldn’t be sad to see Bud Dean die, though she hoped JD wouldn’t kill him. “Pack what you think we need.” JD’s dad was unpredictable, and it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.

An hour later, Heather Chandler called and told them to meet her at the high school because she had to meet with Principal Gowan about taking a few days off. Duke had to do the same thing, but she said she doubted anyone would even notice that she was gone. Westerburg’s library was rather underutilized.

Once again, the halls of Westerburg felt eerie and empty as they walked through them. It was strange to walk into the library where she and JD had met Martha Dunnstock all those years ago. Very little had changed, though Veronica noticed that the “New Releases” shelf was far better stocked than it had ever been when she was a student. Duke was making positive changes.

JD wandered away from her to look out the windows, and Veronica saw him trace his finger over the symbol he’d carved into the glass when Heather had first taken this job. The school was one of the town wards, but it wasn’t protected any better than a regular building, and now that the other ward was gone, the town was far less safe than it had once been. Warding the library had fallen to JD and Chandler; it was a large enough space to house plenty of people if things went bad, but small enough that they could make sure it was protected.

They hadn’t been waiting long when Chandler walked in, her face perplexed. “Gowan knows…”

All eyes turned to Heather, but Duke spoke first. “Knows what?”

“About all of it. The ghosts, witchcraft, the wards, all of it. Veronica, he knew your grandmother. She put him in charge of protecting the school after she died. He said he always wondered if you were like her, but he couldn’t ask.”

Veronica snorted, quickly getting past her surprise. “I wouldn’t have told him the truth even if he asked.”

Chandler smiled, “And guess what else?” She didn’t pause long enough for any of them to actually guess. “He’s going to make me principal when he retires in a few years!”

“The queen of Westerburg rises again,” JD laughed.

“Actually, Westerburg has a new queen these days. I’m more of a goddess…”

JD rolled his eyes, “And so humble.”

Before they could start bickering, Veronica cut in. “Who’s this new queen?”

Distracted and pleased, Heather turned to Veronica. “The first member of our coven, actually. She’s an empath with a lot of potential.”

“Oh, wow, I didn’t realize you bragged about me to your friends.” The voice came from the doorway, where a pretty blonde teenager was standing. She sauntered in, all confidence, reminding Veronica of Heather in her high school days.

Her eyes suddenly focused on JD, and she tilted her head as if trying to recognize a song she was hearing on a radio in another room. “You’re JJ.”

JD stepped back like she’d threatened him. “JD, actually.”

Her lips puckered and the lines on her forehead deepened. “Are you sure? I’m usually not wrong about this kind of thing. You carved the symbol into that window, and your name is JJ.”

“I’m pretty fucking sure I know my own name.”

Veronica was surprised by his anger, and she walked over to stand beside him. She wasn’t sure if she was there to support him or to stop him from verbally attacking the teenager.

But the girl shrugged and let it okay. “I guess I misunderstood. Sometimes feelings are messy. Anyway, I’m Kim Kelly.”

The room fell silent as they JD and Veronica remembered at once that Kurt had had a sister, and his family was supposed to be magically powerful, like Veronica’s and Heather’s.   Veronica glared at Duke and Chandler, furious that they hadn’t mentioned that _this_ was their gifted pupil.

And she was an empath. “Why are you so uncomfortable? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Veronica assured her, attempting to bury her feelings, and the powerful memories that she couldn’t push out of her mind. Kurt, possessed and approaching her, ready to kill her or worse. Kurt, dead with JD’s bullet in his chest. A suicide note she had written. And here was his little sister.

“Tell me the truth!” Kim demanded, even stomping her foot on the ground.

Chandler walked over and put her hand on Kim’s shoulder. “It’s nothing, Kim. We need to talk about something really important, can you just focus on that for a minute?”

Kim pouted and sulked for a second, but eventually nodded. “What is it?”

“I need to go out of town with them for a few days. Heather is coming with us, so we need you to protect Sherwood while were gone.”

“If I say I will, will you tell me why you’re all so uncomfortable?”

Heather glanced at JD and Veronica, looking for confirmation. Veronica took the lead. “If we said no, would you stop wanting to protect the town? This is where your family and friends live.”

Kim didn’t seem to like that, and she pouted again. “I guess I would.”

“You have to.” Veronica snapped, recalling the times she’d been forced to do things she never would have chosen. “Sometimes, being what you are will mean you have to do hard things, and make hard choices. Sometimes, it even means doing things you’ll regret, or things that have horrible consequences.”

Veronica paused. She had to tell her. Kim deserved to know the truth about what had happened to her brother. Still, it was hard to find the right words, if there were any. “Kim... I’m sure Heather told you that we went to school with your older brother?” Veronica waited for Kim to nod. “Well, he didn’t die the way you think he did.”

Kim gasped, and opened her mouth to speak, but Veronica held up he hand, afraid that if she stopped, she wouldn’t start again. “He was possessed, and back then, I didn’t know how to fix a possessed person. He was going to hurt me, probably kill me, so—“

“So I killed him.” JD cut in. “To save Veronica.”

The girl had gone white, and all the confidence drained out of her posture and her expression. She looked like someone had kicked her in the stomach. “What?”

Veronica looked at Chandler, who’d also been there when JD killed Kurt and Ram, but she only shrugged.

“You made it look like a suicide so no one found out. You… Why would you tell everyone he was gay? Why?”

Chandler finally took over. “It was revenge. Your brother and his friend hurt someone we care about, and we hated him for it. We were kids back then, and we wanted to get back at everyone who’d ever done anything to us, so we took the opportunity we had.”

After all these years, Veronica still felt a sickening rage when she remembered what Kurt and Ram had done to Heather McNamara, and she couldn’t bring herself to lie about regretting her actions. JD was also silent, and she knew he was thinking the same thing. Given the chance, he would do everything exactly the same way.

Chandler stepped forward to try to comfort Kim, but the younger girl pulled away. “You lied to me! I trusted you!” She turned her rage onto everyone in the room, “You’re all liars and murders!”

JD took a step forward, “No one else here has ever killed anyone!”

Duke broke her silence at last. “And JD didn’t murder anyone. It was defense. If I had been there, I would have done exactly what he did. They were possessed, I promise they would have rather died than lived as a skin suit for an evil ghost.”

“You don’t know that,” Kim hissed, but her anger was clearly flagging. Veronica imagined that Kurt would have been a difficult brother to love, and that Kim probably liked his memory more than the real him. She hoped they hadn’t taken that from her. “He might have… If he’d lived…”

_He might have turned out good._ Veronica could tell they all knew what Kim wanted to say, and no one corrected her, though she was sure none of them believed Kurt would have been a decent adult. They had seen him after he died. His soul was already corrupted enough to become a loose spirit, which meant there hadn’t been much good in him to begin with.

But no one was going to tell her that. “Maybe. Sometimes, that’s the price that we have to pay to protect people, to protect the world. Can you do that?” Chandler’s voice was level, confident.

“Yes.” Though her voice shook, Kim’s eyes blazed. “No one else is going to get hurt. No one else is going to die.”

 

 

After all of that, Veronica was relieved to finally get on the road, even though Heather’s rebuilt van felt like a deathtrap. They’d left Kim in the library, having explained what she had to do in an emergency. Veronica doubted the girl’s life would ever be the same.

Eight hours passed relatively quickly, with all of them in the car. Duke and Chandler kept them all laughing with various stories involving dumb shit that their high schoolers did. Veronica sat up front with JD, while he drove.

The backseat was just empty space, to which McNamara had nailed some couch cushions, creating strange benches on either side of the van. It wasn’t safe— a crash would probably kill them all— but it was comfortable enough.

Before they made it to Michael’s building, JD stopped for gas and a couple slushies. “A little bribery never hurt anyone,” He said with a shrug, “We’re inconveniencing him, just showing up like this.”

“Yeah,” Chandler butted in, “Why didn’t we just call him?”

Veronica didn’t tell her the truth; that JD wasn’t exactly eager to go to California and face whatever he would find there. Instead, she gave the excuse he’d given her. “We need to know what we’re getting into, we shouldn’t get on the road unless we know what the situation is like where we’re going.”

“And what if Michael can’t find anything?” Duke asked reasonably.

Veronica shrugged, “That could be a good sign that nothing much is happening there.”

“Or it could be very, very bad,” JD added ominously.

 

When they finally reached Michael’s fancy office building, the Heathers chose to stay in the car, in order to avoid going into the intimidatingly large building where Michael worked. Veronica envied them.

JD strode confidently to the front desk, ignoring the stares from all of the men in suits as he passed. The secretary didn’t conceal her admiring stare when he made it to her desk. “How can I help you?” Though she seemed attracted to him, she was clearly suspicious.

If JD noticed either of these expressions, he didn’t let on. “We’re here to see Michael Mell, he works in your tech department.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“We don’t need one. We’re old friends of his, just give him a call and say that Jason Dean and Veronica Sawyer are here.”

The secretary reluctantly did so. She repeated what JD had said, hummed into the phone a few times, then looked back at them. “He said to come right down.”

Despite his shockingly lucrative career choice—head of the technical department of some big corporation— Michael’s office was miniscule, and packed to the ceiling with stuff. But despite everything crowding into her vision, Michael was the most noticeable thing in the room.

“How many favors does a person have to do to make up for having his life saved?” He asked with a smile, standing up to hug Veronica and shake JD’s hand. “Or are you here about the wedding?”

When faced with two blank stares, Michael frowned. “Please tell me that you didn’t forget about Jeremy’s wedding. He’s so excited that you’re coming!”

“Shit! That, no, we’re coming. Sorry, I have a lot going on.” JD glanced at Veronica, who honestly had forgotten the wedding.

She smiled, “We’re so happy for Jer, and whether or not he’ll admit it, JD is honored to get to be in it.”

JD rolled his eyes, but didn’t deny it. After everything that had gone down in Middleborough, Jeremy had called JD dozens of times, needing help after his possession. As the only two people they knew who’d had that experience, they’d grown close. When Jeremy had proposed to the girl he’d dated all through college, he’d asked JD to be in the wedding.

“Sadly though,” JD cut in before Michael could say anything. “That’s not why we’re here. We need information.”

“Guys, I’m really swamped with actual work right now. You know I love the paranormal research stuff, but I have a real job. This isn’t a good time.”

JD set the extra slushie on Michael’s desk, which seemed to soften him a little, but he didn’t give in. So he took a different tactic. “Hey, Michael, do you remember the time I dragged your ass out of a burning building?”

“Or the time I stuffed your soul back into your body, bringing you back from the dead?” Veronica added with a cheery smile.

Michael sighed and rolled his eyes, “You guys are the worst, you know that?” Neither of them bothered denying it. “What do you need?”

“We need everything you can find out about a town called Sunnydale.” Veronica said, crowding around Michael’s monitor with JD.

Michael didn’t start typing. “Sunnydale? I don’t need to look that up. Everyone knows about Sunnydale.”

Veronica and JD, both fairly familiar with ghosts and ghost hunting, tried not to show their irritation with that statement. “What do you mean?”

“Sunnydale is another town like Sherwood. It has a stronger connection to the spirit world than most places, so weird shit happens there all the time.” As usual, Michael became very animated as he started talking about one of his interests.

“Has anything happened recently? Like in the past couple of days?” JD finally let some of his stress show, curbing Michael’s enthusiasm some.

Michael turned towards his computer, “Hang on, let me check the forums.”

JD leaned over and whispered in Veronica’s ear, “What the fuck is a forum?” Veronica shrugged. Neither of them bothered much with technology, allowing Duke and Michael to do the heavy lifting where that was concerned.

After a few minutes, Michael stopped his intermittent typing and scrolling. “Looks like Sunnydale is having some unusual weather patterns, which occasionally have been associated with evil activity, but nothing more than that. No murders or disappearances that I can see… Yeah, the only recent death was a hit and run a few days ago. Other than that, it’s your normal, sleepy town.”

Veronica scoffed, “Yeah, so was Sherwood until a loose spirit tried to blow up the high school.”

JD nodded, resigned. “Alright, well call us if you hear anything else. Heather’s girlfriend is watching our phones, she’ll tell you how to get in touch with us.”

Michael nodded. “Good luck, you guys. Try not to die.”

JD smirked, “We always do.”

 

As they walked out of the building, Veronica couldn’t help but feel apprehensive. Something about this job seemed strange, and it was more than JD’s dad’s involvement. “JD, I’m worried about this.”

“I know, Ronnie. But we’re going to be okay.” He smiled, “We always are.”

Veronica laughed, slightly soothed, though not by much. “Our love is god?”

“Our love is god. Let’s go to California.”


	4. Driving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise the action will start in the next chapter. I've been really busy so it's been hard to find time to write, but I'm working really hard to get chapters out in a reasonable amount of time. Thanks for understanding. Enjoy!

“Heather, move. I’m driving.” JD glared at Heather Duke, whose small body was currently occupying the driver’s seat.

“You drove all the way to New York, then through most of the night without stopping. You need sleep! I can drive for a few hours.” Duke had stolen his seat while he was in the bathroom at the latest sketchy gas station, and now she was stubbornly refusing to leave it.

JD glared at her. “I don’t need sleep. I’m fine. Get out of my seat.”

“Heather’s right,” Veronica joined in, returning to the van after a lap around the parking lot to stretch her legs, “You should rest. We’ll need you once we get to Sunnydale.”

It was hard to argue with that, though he desperately didn’t want to have to sit with his thoughts; or worse, sleep with his nightmares. But he refused to say that aloud to Heather and Veronica, so he nodded and moved to the back of the van.

Veronica joined him on the cushions on the side of the van, facing Heather Chandler. Heather McNamara went up front to navigate for Duke while she drove. It felt weird to sit back there while they drove. When it was just him and Veronica, he always drove.

After a while, the motion of the van lulled him into a partial sleep, slumping against the cushions with Veronica’s head in his lap. His dreams were a confusing tangle that featured both his parents and several blurred, frightening images. He woke with a slight start and blinked to clear his head.

When his eyes were focused enough, he looked up to find Chandler’s gray eyes trained on him. “How long has it been?”

Though he was pretty sure he knew what she was asking, he forced her to say it anyway. “Since what?”

“You saw your dad.”

JD sighed, and Veronica stirred, sitting up enough to lean her head on his shoulder. He couldn’t tell if she was awake. “Two years. We ran into him on a job in Georgia.”

“How did it go?” Chandler continued to stare at him like she was searching for lies on his face. A flashlight hanging from the ceiling provided her with exactly enough light to see them, if he decided to tell any.

He decided not to. There was no point; Veronica would just tell her the truth later. “Not good. Veronica hates him and doesn’t bother to hide it. He doesn’t trust her, and it pisses him off that she’s so much better at the job than he is. He’s been doing this for decades and Veronica shows up, sees a problem, and fixes it before anything goes horribly wrong. Bud… well he didn’t take it well.”

“What happened?”

JD wished she would just let it drop, but he knew she wouldn’t. “We did the job, he yelled at me for being sloppy. Veronica tried to defend me and for a second… I don’t know. I thought he was going to hurt her, and I just… froze. He might have hit her, and I didn’t do a goddamn thing to stop it.”

Heather was silent for a long minute. “It makes sense for you to be afraid of him, JD.”

“I am not afraid of him!” JD hissed, and his own anger scared him. He sounded like his father.

Heather leaned away from him. “Okay then… I was trying to be nice.”

“That’s a little out of your element, don’t you think?”

Heather rolled her eyes. “You’re right. Next time I won’t bother.”

She turned away and became focused on her fingernails, ending the conversation. JD was relieved. He didn’t want to talk about Bud, and he certainly didn’t want to admit that even after all these years, even after surpassing Bud at every skill he’d ever taught JD, he was still afraid of him. Sometimes his nightmares were still haunted by his father’s voice, reminding him of the rules.

“Goddamn rules,” JD muttered under his breath.

“We don’t need them,” Veronica muttered, still mostly asleep.

JD smiled down at her and kissed the top of her head. There was something soothing about having her in his arms. His defensive anger melted away enough for him to relax a little. “I’m sorry, Heather.”

Chandler glared at him out of the corner of her eye. “You should be.” But after a moment she sighed and turned back to face them. “Maybe try not to go all psycho on us though? We’re your friends.”

“Maybe try to act like it?” JD dropped his imitation of her tone. “I don’t like talking about my dad.”

She nodded and let the subject drop. “So, Veronica said you were going to be in Jeremy’s wedding?”

“YES!” McNamara called from the front of the van, “Tell us all about it!”

Chandler laughed at her enthusiasm, rolling her eyes. “Have you met the girl? We’re dying to know who would marry our beloved human disaster.”

JD rolled his eyes, but he didn’t disagree. Jeremy—who’d always been an anxious person—had become infinitely more so after being possessed. Years later, he was a little better, but there were a lot of things that still terrified him. Though he would never admit it, JD sometimes felt the same way. “Christine is a good person. I met her once, when we passed by his college on a job. She was…” He had to pause for a minute to try and describe the girl Jeremy had taken on their double date, “Enthusiastic. But she was crazy about him. Apparently when he told her the whole truth, she was really cool about it.”

Heather McNamara leaned around the seat to smile at them. “That’s so sweet!”

Veronica had finally woken up and pulled herself into a sitting position. “She was so nice. She majored in theatre, but Jeremy said she just got her first job as a weather girl on a local news station.”

The image of Jeremy’s hyper, bubbly fiancée giving a weather report was enough to shake JD out of his bad mood and make him smile. It also helped that Veronica was smiling at him.

After that, McNamara tried to get details about wedding themes and décor which Veronica and JD couldn’t give her. JD planned on showing up ten minutes before the wedding, throwing on whatever suit Michael handed him and then going to a party with Veronica and all their friends. This answer did not satisfy McNamara and she turned back to face forward in protest.

The talk died down, and JD eventually managed to doze off sprawled out across the back of the van, with Veronica leaning against his shoulder. He woke up hours later when she started kissing him.

JD slid his hands into her hair, pulling her closer and sinking into the kiss. The light was off and the back of the van was pitch black without it, but they didn’t need to be able to see each other. Veronica responded enthusiastically and wrapped her arms around him. Slowly, he slid his hands down, until they were wrapped around her throat.

No. That wasn’t right. JD knew Veronica didn’t like that. He tried to make himself let go, but his hands didn’t obey him. Instead of releasing her, they squeezed tighter. The light must have come on, because now he could see her. He could see that she was terrified and choking, but he couldn’t let go. Veronica gasped his name, over and over, begging him to stop but he wasn’t in control of his hands. She was dying, and he was killing her.

“JD!”

Veronica’s voice cut through the nightmare and he woke with a start. Panicked, he shoved himself away from her before he was fully aware. It had been a dream. He hadn’t hurt her. “Ronnie?”

The light was off, but enough light filtered in from the front windshield that he could make out her wide brown eyes and worried face. “I’m here, it’s okay,” She whispered, reaching towards him.

He let her pull him into a hug and tried to forget the dream. It wasn’t the first time he’d had it, but it never ceased to terrify him. “I’m fine,” He kept his voice low and leaned into her arms, breathing the familiar scent of her hair as he waited for his heart rate to slow. “I hurt you.”

“You didn’t. You wouldn’t. It wasn’t real.” She ran her hands down his back as she held him. “I’m here.”

It had felt real. It always did. “I love you,” Since it was the only thing he could make himself say, he hoped she understood what he meant.

A small, sad smile crossed her face. “Our love is god.”

He nodded, but didn’t repeat their phrase. “I don’t want to sleep.”

“You don’t have to. I’ll stay up with you.” She shifted and settled in, leaning against him so he could wrap his arms around her. Whenever he had nightmares, she always made a point of getting as close to him as she could, as if proving to him that she wasn’t afraid. It always took him a few minutes to stop acting like she was made of glass and enjoy having her nearby.

Eventually, the steady beat of her heart, and her quiet breaths calmed him down. “Our love is god.”

Veronica smiled and kissed him softly, but didn’t let it linger. She reached for his hand, and he became aware of a slight change. There was a new awareness of something warm, bright and white, pressing just behind his eyes. Veronica was stretching her soul outside of herself so that he could feel it. She had first come across the ability when Jeremy had done it to her while he was possessed. Not to be outdone, Veronica had practiced until she could do it for short periods of time, though unlike Jeremy she couldn’t pass on messages.

Regardless, it was comforting, and JD closed his eyes to feel it better.

“You two had better not be being gross back there!” Heather Duke’s voice cut the silence, and Veronica pulled her hand away, breaking their connection.

JD rolled his eyes and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. That kind of contact was… intimate, though not in the way that Heather was talking about. “Of course not Heather, believe it or not, having everyone here and being packed into the back of a kidnapping van doesn’t exactly turn me on.”

“Don’t talk mean about my van, or you can walk to California,” McNamara grumbled.

Chandler rolled over and lifted a sleeping mask off of her eyes. “All of you need to shut up. Right now.” Without waiting for argument or apology, she turned back around and went to sleep.

In deference to Chandler’s wrath, JD lowered his voice. “I can take over driving whenever you want, Heather.”

“I’m fine, thanks. I’ve only been doing this for a couple hours. Get some sleep.” Heather went back to focusing on the road, and JD got the feeling she didn’t want to talk anymore.

Veronica glanced at Chandler, but it didn’t stop her from whispering to JD. “Did it work?”

He thought back to the feeling of her soul brushing up against his. “Sort of. I didn’t get any specific message, but I could definitely feel it.”

“I was trying to send a message,” She sighed, eyes downcast. “I thought maybe I could show you a happy memory or feeling. Nothing?”

JD shook his head. “Not this time, but that might be my fault. I might not be able to sense something like that.”

He didn’t miss the disappointment on her face, though it was gone almost as quickly as it had appeared. “Not everything is your fault.” She kissed him and smiled a little, settling back into his chest.

Letting his mind wander, JD started playing with Veronica’s hair absently. It was easier to shake away dark thoughts when he was here with Veronica and the Heathers. This was a safe place. So he let himself travel all the dark paths of his brain, as he finally considered the possibility he was trying hardest to think about.

What if Bud Dean was dead?

The man had haunted so much of JD’s life, had shaped him in so many ways—both good and bad—that JD wasn’t sure how he could possibly process him being dead. When he was younger, after his mother’s death and long before he’d met Veronica, he’d often wished that Bud would die on a hunt. As he’d gotten older, JD believed Bud when he said that JD couldn’t survive without him. Of course, after Sherwood, Veronica, being possessed, and Bud leaving him to die, he’d lost that illusion.

Frustrated with his circular thoughts, JD raked his hand through his too-long hair. Heather was probably right that he should have cut it. It wasn’t annoying yet, so he hadn’t bothered with it, and Veronica had mentioned that she liked it.

“What are you thinking about?”

He tried not to jump; he’d thought Veronica was asleep. Unable to admit that he’d been thinking about his hair, he shrugged. “My dad. Do you think he’s…” JD couldn’t finish the sentence.

“I could check for you?” Veronica offered. “If he died but didn’t move on, I’d be able to find him in the spirit world.”

“Don’t bother. He would move on, and honestly I’m probably not giving him enough credit. It would take a lot to kill him.” Once again, JD’s mind turned to all the times he’d hoped or wished that Bud would die. He always survived. Though their hunts had often put both of them in extremely dangerous situations that left them with potentially life-threatening injuries, Bud always survived. JD had a lot of negative things to say about him, but the man was tough, practically indestructible.

It was one of the few traits JD was happy to have inherited from him.

Veronica reached up so she could brush her hand over his cheek. “It’s going to be alright, no matter what happens.”

JD nodded and kissed the top of her head. He appreciated her comfort, but he was still terrified of what they might find in California.

 

They were just driving past a sign that read “Welcome to Sunnydale” when Veronica tensed suddenly and looking around. JD was familiar with all of Veronica’s abilities and senses, and his hands tensed on the steering wheel.

Her eyes were searching the street for something JD couldn’t see. “Something’s wrong. There’s… there’s something evil here.”

“Where?” JD turned around to glance at the girls in the back of the van, “Heather! Heather! Heather! Wake up!” They all stirred and griped at him with varying degrees of irritation before they noticed Veronica’s white face and anxious glare.

Veronica was still looking out over the street. “I can feel it. It’s… god I’ve never felt anything like this. JD, turn right!”

He did as he was told, and Veronica continued to direct him, following her sense until they were close enough that JD, Chandler, and even Duke had goosebumps, and that horrible prickling feeling on the back of their necks.

“Park here, this is it.” Veronica glared at the large white stucco building in front of them, and it took JD a minute to figure out why.

When he did, he wanted to be sick. They were standing on the steps of Sunnydale High School. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”


	5. Dark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, there are so many amazing people who've been so kind to me while I wrote this, and I'd like to thank them, but I'm so tired, stressed, and busy that I just can't. I hope you know who you are. Thank you all for reading this. Enjoy

“What the fuck is that?”

Veronica froze and turned to look at Chandler, with one arm halfway through her sleeve. “My coat?”

Heather was visibly grinding her teeth, “And what kind of coat would you say it is?”

Despite what they were going into, JD seemed to be fighting laughter. Ignoring him, Veronica finished putting her coat on so she could glare at Heather properly. “It’s a trench coat. There’s a protective—“

“Oh for fucks sake, just admit it’s aesthetics and be done with it!” Heather Duke called from the van.    

The coat had started as a joke; something she found in a store that she thought would make JD laugh. It had, but later when they’d been on a hunt that required late night breaking and entering she’d found that it was useful for hiding in the shadows. She wore it occasionally on hunts, partly because she liked having another protection— even though she couldn’t be possessed—and also because Duke wasn’t wrong about the aesthetic.

Ignoring them and not bothering with an explanation, Veronica kept the coat on and tucked her knife into her pocket. She looked around at the assembled group, and while her nerves were oppressive, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather be doing this with. Whatever was waiting for them in that school, they could handle it.

JD finished checking the supplies in his bag and walked over to her, he posture taught and his face tense. “We don’t know that he’s in there.”

“No, but something evil is in there. If he was here on a hunt, he had to have come to this building.”

Duke, overhearing them, called, “Unlikely, seeing as it’s still standing.”

Veronica ignored her, “JD, there’s something awful in that school, I can feel it. It’s so strong it’s making me sick. I know you want to look for your dad, but I can’t just leave this, and I honestly think this is a good place to start.” She hoped he could see the faint sheen of sweat on her forehead, hoped he had noticed how pale she had become. Her abilities made her unable to ignore this kind of presence.

“What does it feel like?”

“Like…” Veronica tried to articulate what this felt like. She had only ever felt like this once before, years ago, and the memory was blurred and confused by alcohol and adrenaline. “It feels like the thing that attacked me outside your window. Except worse.”

JD went pale, and Veronica immediately wished she hadn’t brought it up. The thing that had attacked her had later possessed JD, in what he referred to as the most fucked up thing to happen in his incredibly fucked up life. He took a deep breath and gathered himself. “Okay, good to know.”

She looked back at everyone, and noticed that they were all just standing around. They didn’t have time to stall, as tempting as it was. Veronica braced herself. “Are we ready? Let’s go.”

Sunnydale was a nice high school, built around a large courtyard that they all walked trough without examining much. Veronica led the way, and could have done it with her eyes closed, so strong were her feelings of unease. Wherever they were strongest was where she directed them.

JD walked next to her, and she pretended she couldn’t see the gun in his hand. He had stopped using them on most of their hunts; they didn’t do much good unless someone needed to be killed, which hadn’t happened since he’d shot Kurt and Ram. The last time he’d even made a point of carrying one had been the hunt in Georgia, and that was because his dad had been there. Though Veronica couldn’t keep track of all the rules Bud had imposed on JD, she was fairly certain there was one about always being armed. He hadn’t managed to let go of the rules; even years after he stopped working with his father, he sometimes berated himself for breaking one.

If the building hadn’t felt so full of evil, she would have wondered—not for the first time—why they were bothering to save Bud at all.

She reached down and squeezed JD’s hand as they took another turn and ended up face to face with the last door Veronica would have wanted to go through, and the one that she knew would lead them to the source of her horrible feeling.

“The boiler room,” JD muttered tonelessly.

Veronica could sense the Heathers exchanging glances behind them, but JD and Veronica’s attention was locked on the door. Having to be in a high school was bad enough, having to go down to the boiler room was worse.

They glared at the door for a long time before Veronica said, “Fuck it” and kicked it open. JD took the lead as they walked down the stairs.

It was exactly like the room where Veronica had fought JD when he was possessed, except worse because of the intense feeling of loose spirits that pervaded it. Dimly lit and smelling of dust and dirt, there was nothing suspicious in view.

“It’s below us,” Veronica whispered, noticing that her companions had started to sweat despite the cool air. They could feel it too, even without her senses.

“Let’s look for a door or something,” JD didn’t follow her example, speaking at full volume and startling all of them. They set to work.

Veronica was the one who found it, a strange pull leading her to the far corner where a wooden door sat, barely visible in the darkness. It wasn’t labeled, and it looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. When she turned the knob, it opened without resistance.

“Where is it?” She whispered into the cavernous blackness on the other side of the door.

JD came to stand beside her, “Where’s what?”

“The thing I’m feeling. It has to know I’m here, and spirits like that can’t resist a medium, or a witch for that matter, and we have two of those. Why isn’t it attacking?” Veronica strained her eyes searching the darkness, but saw nothing.

No one had an answer for her question, but she felt Heather McNamara reach out and grab her hand. Chandler took McNamara’s other hand, as Veronica reached for JD. Ignoring his brief look of confusion, Duke grabbed his other hand, and they walked down the stairs together, facing the darkness united.

 

“What the fuck?” Duke whispered when they reached the bottom and stepped into an open space lit with torches. “What the hell kind of high school has a dungeon?”

JD nodded, “That’s taking the metaphor a little far, don’t you think?”

“Jason?” A weak, gravelly voice sounded from one of the closed wooden doors that lined the room.

JD raced over to it and looked through the small barred opening into the cell, “Dad?”

Veronica joined him, standing on her toes so she could see inside the cell.

Bud Dean was sitting against the back wall of the cell, mostly obscured by shadows. The half of his face that was visible in the flickering firelight was badly scarred and the eye was completely gone. He looked like a dead thing come back to life to deliver a warning.

He pushed himself off the wall to come closer, his remaining eye icy and trained on Veronica. “So you brought the girl. I didn’t think you would.”

JD stepped back, his face hard. “What have you done?” Though his voice was toneless, Veronica could see the pain and fear in his eyes.

“JD…” She reached for him, a warning on her lips. The others stepped in so they were standing in a line, all of them sensing that something powerful was coming.

The door burst open, and a girl stepped through. Veronica didn’t register anything about her looks aside from the fact that she was young; her eyes were fixated on the things standing beside her.

Loose spirits, somehow rendered tame and standing like horrifying guard dogs on either side of the girl. She walked slowly towards them, her companions seemed to roll forward like smoke, their shape almost human, but horribly bent and broken.

The stranger smiled, “So, I hear one of you can bring back the dead.”

Everyone was careful not to look at Veronica, who was busy trying to figure out a way to banish the spirits without alerting the girl that she was the one with powers.

But she didn’t even bother asking them. She turned to Bud, “Which one?”

JD’s jaw clenched and Veronica saw him start to speak, but his father beat him to it. “It’s the dark haired one, the short one.”

The spirits turned towards Duke at the same time as their mistress. “Well, then….”

Ignoring JD’s panicked glance Veronica shoved her way in front of Duke, nearly knocking her over. “It’s me! He was talking about me!” Just to prove her point, she held out her hand and focused her energy. “GO!”

Both spirits evaporated, banished to the spirit realm.

A slow smile crept onto the girl’s face. “Yes he was. Impressive power.” The girl’s villainy felt strangely practiced and forced, like she’d had to rehearse it. “But not quite enough.”

She broke into peals of forced laughter as two more spirits coalesced next to her, summoned to her side. “Grab her.”

The spirits lunged toward Veronica and JD pushed her back, drawing his gun. They swatted it out of his hands, somehow strong enough to manifest physically. Moving faster than JD was capable of, one of them reached out and tore its claws through JD’s face.

There was blood everywhere.

JD hit the ground, his hand pressed to his face. Veronica screamed, unable to hold it in. The spirits vanished, the force of her fear and pain obliterating them. Four more took their place and started to advance on JD and the others.

“Leave them alone! Please.” Veronica hated the sound of her begging, but she hated the sight of JD clutching his face, groaning in pain far, far more. “Please, I’ll do anything.”

That stupid, horrible smile was back. “Exactly what I hoped you’d say.”

“Ronnie…” JD’s voice was weak with pain as he tried to force himself upright.

The sight of his tattered cheek only strengthened her resolve. “If you let them go, I’ll go with you. I’ll do what you want.” She bent her head, hating that she couldn’t have come up with a better plan. She was never going to be allowed to lecture JD about self-sacrifice again.

“Perfect.” She looked up to address her demented pets, “Grab her.”

The sound of screams filled the room, and it took Veronica a moment to realize they were hers. She no longer felt connected enough to her body to react that way. The spirits had seized her arms and her soul was burning, dying. It was agony beyond language. Pain that couldn’t be diminished or expressed with screams.

The girl was laughing; giddy and eerie as she watched it all happen. Veronica felt herself being dragged from the room, and she looked back in time to see two more spirits backing her friends into a cell.

She couldn’t stop screaming long enough to protest as she was dragged from the room.

They let go of her—finally giving her some relief—when they arrived upstairs. Veronica fell to her knees, catching her breath and noticing for the first time that her arms were bleeding where the spirits’ claws had dug into her skin. The soul-pain settled down, allowing her to think clearly.

She was in what looked like a science classroom. Something covered by a white sheet was lying atop one of the black tables. Looking at it filled Veronica with dread.

Too angry to be smart and conserve her power, Veronica banished the spirits. Even now that she was alone she didn’t try to run. A sick curiosity was driving her towards the thing under the sheet.

She took slow, measured steps toward the table, and her fingers had just brushed the sheet when the classroom door opened. “Don’t touch that!” The measured, practiced tones of her voice were gone, leaving ragged panic.

Veronica stepped back and dropped her hand. There were a dozen things she wanted to say to this bitch, but she couldn’t make herself say any of them. She couldn’t forget the sight of JD’s face, torn and bloody, as she was being dragged away. He would bleed out unless Heather could get to him, and when Veronica had looked back, the spirits had been pushing Heather away from him.

“What do you want?” She hissed at the girl, desperate to get this over with so she could rescue her friends.

The girl didn’t seem to notice or care about her urgency. “Is it true that you brought a boy back to life?”

“Yes.”

The girl’s smile became almost manic in a strange combination of hope and insane desperation. “Can you do it again?”

Veronica hesitated, torn between telling the truth and doing whatever she could to save her friends and her boyfriend. “I… It depends. Michael—the boy I saved—hadn’t been dead for very long, minutes at the most. And I had Heather there to heal him, so his body was fine. It’s not… it isn’t simple. You can’t just shove a soul back into a body and expect it to pop back to life like they’re waking up from a nap.” Once again her eyes drifted to the thing on the table. Her stomach sank as she began to realize what it was.

“Make it simple.” Her voice was low and threatening. “Fix her, bring my sister back, or I’ll kill all of them. I’ll start with the boy and we’ll see if you can make it _simple_ for him.”

Veronica tensed, trying in vain to fight the tears that sprang automatically to her eyes when she pictured JD as she’d last seen him. “Please…”

“Fix. Her.”

With that, the girl jerked the sheet off of the table and revealed the body.

No, not a body. A corpse.

It had probably once been a young girl. The hair was too matted with blood for Veronica to be able to tell what color it had been. Her skin was blotchy and blue, marbled with gray. The worst part was the limbs though. Her legs and arms were horrifically bent, twisted into shapes that could never happen to a living person.

And her neck…

Veronica had to look away. She focused her energy and began trying to call to the soul that must have inhabited this body. She reached in and tried to call attention to herself so that someone might show up. No answer came. “What was her name? I need to find her before I can do anything.”

“Jade,” The girl choked, her gray-brown eyes wide as she started at Veronica.

Reaching back to the spirit world, Veronica did all she could to call to Jade without leaving her body. She didn’t want to be dead and vulnerable around this girl.

There was still no response, and Veronica was getting tired. “I’m sorry. Either your sister moved on or she doesn’t want to come. There’s nothing I can do.”

She didn’t see the slap coming at all. “No! Fucking fix her! Make her come here and make her come back!”

For a second, Veronica thought she was going to break down into sobs but instead she lashed out again, hitting Veronica in the mouth. “BRING MY SISTER BACK!”

A spirit appeared next to her, summoned by the rage that Veronica could feel emanating off the girl. Instead of attacking Veronica again, she stepped back and let the ghost move forward, claws outstretched.

The blinding soul pain started again, and Veronica couldn’t even scream. Tears in her eyes, she collapsed to the ground as the world went dark.


	6. Captive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. I felt kind of down about this story and was worried that people didn't like it/weren't interested, to the point where I almost abandoned it. I finally came around and managed this chapter, I know it's not my best work, hopefully the next one will be better. Comments are appreciated. Enjoy!

Heather Chandler watched Veronica get dragged out the door and upstairs. Her screams echoed even after the door had closed. As much as she would have liked to shut down and freak out that Veronica was gone, she had bigger issues to deal with.

Namely, the two fucking demons that were still in the room with them. And the fact that JD’s face might have been torn off. JD was the most pressing issue so she started towards him. The spirits bent forward into what was probably an attack position and Heather froze. Duke and McNamara both backed towards Bud’s cell door, which swung open somehow. Another step back would take them into the cell itself, cutting them off from JD.

Ignoring all of her better instincts—which were telling her that she could not and should not do this—Heather lunged towards JD and the spirits. She had one second to gather her energy and put it fully towards what she wanted to do. “FUCK OFF!”

The spirits backed away one step, enough for her to reach JD and grab him under the arms, pulling him back towards the cell.   Duke dashed forwards and grabbed his other arm to help her; together they managed to get him into the cell. The door swung shut, leaving them trapped. Heather still felt better with a barrier between them and the spirits, even if they could probably just pass right through it.

For a tense second, Heather watched and waited for them to try and get into the cell, but they didn’t. Instead, they stood on either side of the door as shadowy terrifying guards.

Safe for now, Heather turned her attention to JD and had to bite back a scream. Up close, his face was horribly torn up.

McNamara looked away and retched. Duke stared, horrified. “Is that…” She pointed to something suspiciously white among all the red.

“Bone? Yes.” Though it was tempting to dig through her pockets to find some plants to help, she didn’t think she had time, so she swallowed her disgust and pressed her hands against JD’s wound.

Healing came naturally to her now. The warmth of her magic slipping through her fingers as it worked to follow the instructions she muttered under her breath. “Heal, mend. Be as you were.”

Her mind was filled with an image of JD’s face, undamaged, as it had been before the spirit’s claws had torn into it. Slowly, his skin started to form back together, the tears shrinking until at last they vanished completely. His face was still covered in blood, but the wounds were gone.

Heather let out her breath. “He’s fine.”

Duke’s brow was furrowed. “Why isn’t he waking up? He’s fine now, right?”

“Let him sleep. He’ll only panic when he wakes up and realizes Veronica isn’t here.” Heather could picture him throwing himself uselessly against the door in a vain attempt to break it down. It was definitely better for him to stay unconscious.

Bud had watched the whole thing with a look of vague disinterest, and he finally pushed himself off the wall to look at his son. “Not bad healing.”

Heather rolled her eyes. Everyone in that cell knew it was perfect healing, and she felt no need to prove herself to this man. The image of JD bleeding and broken in Veronica’s bed during their first adventure was still burned into her mind. She doubted there was anything Bud could do to ever make up for that, and he didn’t seem to be trying to.

Heather McNamara still looked green. “Can you do anything about the blood?”

“No.” Chandler snapped, not really concerned about McNamara’s nausea. Now that JD was healed, her mind turned to the more pressing concern. “We’ll do something about the blood when we’re out of here.”

“Can’t get out,” Bud replied, though Heather hadn’t directed her words at him. “I’ve tried. The door’s solid and she’s got something standing outside, you can feel them if you stand close to the door.”

Biting back her temper, Heather tried to keep her tone neutral. “We can see them. JD might be able to do something about them when he wakes up, but that won’t open the door.”

Before any helpful suggestions could be offered, JD started to stir and push himself upright. He ran tentative fingers over his face, seeming only mildly surprised that it was intact. The thought that he had so much faith in her abilities pleased Heather, though she wouldn’t have admitted it under torture. “Where’s Veronica?”

Of course. JD’s priorities were predictable and unchanging. Duke reached over and put a hand on JD’s shoulder. “That girl took her upstairs….” She looked ready to say more, but JD interrupted her.

“How did she know about Veronica?” JD turned a powerful glare on his father, the rage on his face rendering him scary, even to Heather.

Bud glared back, his remaining eye narrowed. “I told her.” He stopped speaking as though that was all they needed to hear.

JD stood up, hands curling into fists. “Tell us everything you know.”

“Don’t give me orders, Jason.”

Heather moved back to sit against the wall with Duke and McNamara, afraid of being caught in the middle of whatever was happing between JD and his dad. She’d seen both of them fight, and knew how bad it would be if they fought each other.

The two stared each other down for several long moments until finally Bud seemed to relent, though he did so with an air of apathy rather than defeat. “She calls herself Garnet. I came here on a job about a week ago and while I was in the neighborhood, I felt something happen. I went back that night to investigate and she caught me. I don’t know what happened after that, I couldn’t see the damn things but they tossed me in here. The girl showed up and started talking about death. I made some joke about seeing people come back from the dead, which got her attention. She said if I could get the girl here, she’d keep me alive.”

“So you sold us out?” JD hissed, “You selfish son of a—“

“Watch your mouth, boy!” For a second, Heather thought it was about to get violent, but Bud calmed slightly, though his posture was still tense. “I didn’t think you’d bring her. I figured if she hadn’t left you by now you wouldn’t drag her into something like this. You call me selfish, but did you even think before letting her come with you?”

JD went white and his lips pulled back into a snarl as he lunged for his father. Heather wasn’t sure whether his rage was due to the implication that JD didn’t care about protecting Veronica, or the idea of JD having to “let” Veronica do anything, but she didn’t blame him for it. Foreseeing a messy end to this fight, Heather dug through her pockets for a plant she could use.

She didn’t have the chance. JD’s dad took a swing, overbalancing JD and sending him to the ground, where he landed hard on his shoulder. Naturally, it was the shoulder that had never quite healed right after something Bud had done, followed shortly by him landing on it when he and Veronica were flung away from the bomb blast. It still popped out of place and hurt him randomly, despite Heather’s best efforts.

JD rolled back to his feet, glaring at his father and cradling his arm. Bud looked unimpressed. “You’ve gotten so used to all this magic bullshit that you’ve lost all your form. You got disarmed so fast you might as well not have even bothered bringing the damn gun. Jesus Christ, Jason, don’t you remember the rules?” He muttered something else under his breath, but Heather didn’t catch it.

Heather expected JD to be angry, but one hit seemed to have defeated him. He sat next to Duke, still glaring in Bud’s direction.

Silence stretched on. Heather noticed that Bud was bleeding from a cut on his hairline. She didn’t offer to heal it. Let the bastard suffer. He coughed once, a scraping, hollow sound like an engine that wouldn’t start. No one asked if he was alright.

Though Heather could tell Heather, Heather and JD were dying to talk, none of them dared say anything in front of Bud. Duke subtly checked JD’s shoulder to be sure it wasn’t dislocated again. He winced but seemed fine, if a little sore. There wasn’t a lot Heather could do for soreness without her full kit, which she hadn’t brought with her.

Finally, Heather McNamara broke the silence; her voice exploding out of her like a dam had been broken. “What are we doing? How are we getting out of here? Shouldn’t we be… I don’t know breaking down the door or something?”

Bud answered first, beating both Duke and Chandler before they could make a sarcastic comment. “Can’t get out. The door’s solid and those things are waiting to tear you to pieces.”

JD snorted. “The door might be an issue, but the spirits won’t be. I can make them leave, but I’m not going anywhere without Veronica.”

Duke reached out and put a hand on JD’s shoulder, but Bud didn’t bother with sympathy. “Leave the girl, you don’t need her. Looks like you’ve already got three lined up to take her place.” His smile made Heather shudder.

Duke and McNamara both looked equally horrified. Only JD seemed calm. Except, it was the scary kind of calm. Deadly calm. “Did you just suggest that I should leave my girlfriend to die and replace her with one of my friends?”

“JD…” Duke tugged on his sleeve, trying to call his attention. He shook her off.

 

“Are you trying to say that you think Veronica is easily _replaced_?” JD stood up. Bud did the same so the two were facing each other. Heather heard the spirits outside the door shifting, feeding on the anger that was rolling off of both men. She reached into her pocket again in case she needed to knock out either person.

McNamara started crying, which was irritating, though even Chandler had to admit she was justified. The cell was way too small for JD and his dad to really fight like they looked like they were about to.

“Stand down, Jason. You know you won’t win this.” Bud’s lips curved into a harsh smile. “You never have.”

Duke looked at Chandler, desperate. “Do something!”

“Like what?” Heather hissed back, “You want me to get in the middle of twenty-one years of pent up rage? Thanks, but never.”

JD missed the exchange; too busy goading his father. “Last time you had both eyes.”

“You think this little scratch makes me weak?” Bud swung, landing a hit to JD’s eye that sent him staggering back. McNamara sobbed harder.

The spirits surged forward towards the door, and for the first time, Bud looked scared.

JD, blood streaming down his face, looked anything but. “LEAVE!” He held up his hand as he bellowed, and both spirits dissipated like smoke in a strong breeze.

Bud fell back against the cell wall, coughing hard. JD ignored him, breathing hard. Heather reached up and pressed her fingers against the cut, getting yet more blood on her hands. It closed, leaving no scar. “That’s the last time I’m fixing your face today. Next time, I’m letting you scar.”

JD didn’t smile, which had been her intention. “Why isn’t she back yet, Heather?”

She feigned ignorance. “What do you mean?”

“We’ve been down here for too long. Veronica should be back by now.”

The anxiety in his voice made Heather nervous as well, but she wouldn’t let herself consider the thoughts that his words had inspired. “Maybe she… I don’t know, maybe it’s just taking a long time or she’s fighting the demon-whisperer or something.”

Duke butted in. “She wouldn’t fight, not if she thought one of us would get hurt if she did. JD’s right, we’ve been here too long.”

“What do you propose we do about that?” Chandler snapped.

JD nodded, his face set in stone. “Even without the spirits, there’s no way out of here, and I’m still not leaving Veronica.”

Duke and McNamara both looked ready to argue, but Chandler held up her hand. “JD, you’re putting her in more danger if you stay.”

He hesitated, still angry, but at least listening. “How?”

“She’d do anything to keep you safe. _Anything_.” Heather paused to let the significance of that sink in. “The best way to help her, is to get yourself out so she can fight back.”

There was a long pause. “I know you’re right,” JD whispered, his voice choked and broken, “But I just can’t leave her.”

“You have to!” Duke insisted, “She can take care of herself.”

Chandler put her hand on his shoulder, “I know how you feel. If it was Laura… Fuck, I don’t even know what I would do, but she’s safer if we leave.”

She could see that his thoughts were tearing him apart, but she could also tell that her logic was winning. He didn’t admit it. “There’s no way for us to get out of here anyway.”

“We could always use Courtney,” Duke offered, pulling a gun from the back of her skirt. “You can shoot locks off of doors—“

“NO!” Both Bud and JD leapt towards Heather, reaching for the gun.

JD got there first and plucked it from her hand. “That’s a great way to get hit with a ricochet bullet, Heather. Also, you kept the gun I gave you?”

Heather smiled a little, “Yeah…”

“Are we going to talk about how she named it after Courtney?” McNamara asked, though they all ignored her.

JD handed the gun back to Duke, now that they knew she wasn’t about to get them killed. Bud went back to ignoring them. McNamara wiped tears from her eyes. “So what do we do?”

No one had a good answer for her, so they all sat down and settled in to wait for a chance to escape. JD played with the engagement ring he wore around his neck, his face anxious as he avoided looking at his dad. McNamara cried quietly while Duke attempted to comfort her.

And Chandler waited, and watched, and wondered what had happened to her friend.

It felt like hours went by before they heard Garnet open the door and walk towards their cell. All four occupants stood up and readied themselves for a chance to break out.


	7. Escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, I managed to do this much faster than I thought I would. This chapter is dedicated to the wonderful Xanthera :) I have a lot I could say, but I don't want to bore you with author's notes. Comments motivate me to write so you get faster chapters if you take the time to share your thoughts! Enjoy!

JD watched as Garnet sauntered in. His heart sank.

She was alone.

Veronica wasn’t with her, and she looked far too confident. JD shifted anxiously, wishing he had some kind of weapon, though there wasn’t much he could have done with one. He heard Duke shift next to him, her hand on the gun he’d given her years ago during the Middleborough fight.

Garnet didn’t say anything until she reached the door, peering at them through the barred opening. She was taller than JD had realized—having been previously dwarfed by her ghostly companions—and her angular face was shadowed strangely by the flickering light, reminding JD of a possessed person, though he could see she wasn’t.   Garnet was human and knew what she was doing. JD thought that was worse than the idea of her being possessed.

A smile stretched across her face, and though JD was screaming internally— dying to find out what had happened to Veronica, why she wasn’t here— he stayed silent, glaring at her.

She seemed unperturbed, her expression mild, but forced. Underneath it, her eyes were bright with fury. “You know, I envy your girlfriend’s abilities.” She looked at JD as if she expected a response. He gave none. “She got all the good stuff; talking to ghosts, raising the dead, she saves people. I got the dark stuff. My own mother thought I must be evil, if this is what I could do.”

JD fought to maintain his neutral expression as his lips tried to curl up in disgust. The Heathers crowded beside him, all watching as Garnet continued her monologue. “You see, ever since I was little I could manipulate loose spirits. Twist them and bend them to my will. But it doesn’t work on “good” ghosts. Just the evil ones. What do you think that makes me?”

“A massive cunt?” Chandler offered.

Garnet slammed her hand against the door, showing her rage for the first time. “No! No, according to my mother it made me an abomination—“

“Where’s Veronica?” JD asked, too tired or her endless talking to bother holding the words in anymore.

She ignored him completely and carried on as if he hadn’t spoken. “My mother was a witch, and my sister had abilities too. But somehow, because of what I could do, I was against God. Do you believe in God, Jason Dean?”

“No.” JD answered honestly, “But I believe in Veronica.”

Garnet started to laugh, a scary, desperate sound. “Then your God is dead!” She continued laughing while McNamara started crying, Duke and Chandler both gasped.

Veronica…

A smiled spread across his face. The Heathers and even his father were looking at him like he was insane, but he couldn’t contain it. “Did you double check?”

The laughter stopped. “What?”

JD continued calmly, “Did you double check? Because something a lot worse than you once failed that particular spot check, and Veronica turned up right behind it at the worst possible second.”

Garnet glanced over her shoulder and turned back, “You’re trying to trick me. It won’t work!” Her voice had become shrill. “There’s nothing there and you’re girlfriend is dead! She failed and she died!”

JD smirked. “Heads up.”

Veronica, wielding a fire extinguisher, alive, and absolutely furious came into view. She smashed her weapon into Garnet’s shoulder, throwing her to the ground.

“KILL THEM!” Garnet bellowed, and dozens of spirits appeared and moved towards the cell.

Calmly, Veronica closed her eyes and held out one hand. The spirits dissolved into smoke. She swayed on her feet, dazed from the effort. Garnet saw the opportunity and tackled Veronica, and they both disappeared from view as they crashed to the ground.

JD clenched his hand into a fist, flinching when pain shot up to his injured shoulder. He ignored it and focused on the fight. When the two came back into his field of vision, Veronica was limping but holding her knife. Garnet’s fists were raised and her face was a mask of fury.

They ran at each other, and JD tried not to flinch when they made contact. Veronica lunged for an obvious stab that Garnet easily sidestepped, and used the opportunity to punch Veronica in the mouth.

“What’s happening?” Duke hissed, trying to shove around him and get a look through the small window. “Who’s winning?”

McNamara elbowed JD, sending a painful wave up his arm, enough that he stepped away from the window. She took his place and looked out. “I can’t tell… they both look pretty messed up.”

JD pressed himself back towards the door, muttering, “Kick her ass, babe,” through gritted teeth as he watched Veronica land a solid punch in Garnet’s stomach. While the other girl was winded, Veronica managed to grab her knife off the ground and dart towards Garnet. Her stab missed—JD saw the flash of the blade as it went just past her side—but Veronica managed to hit her, sending the other girl to the ground. JD swore the sound of her head hitting the cement floor echoed.

Veronica straightened up and looked over at them. There was fire in her eyes and blood on her face. She had never been more beautiful. She used the knife to jimmy the lock open and they practically fell into each other’s arms.

Her eyes were unfocused as she reached up to touch his cheek where the claws had torn his skin. “I’m fine now,” He whispered, resting his forehead against hers. Veronica smiled softly, and collapsed.

His attempt to keep her upright was agony as his shoulder refused to take the weight, and he couldn’t keep himself from crying out.

McNamara came to his rescue, lifting Veronica up with an arm around her shoulders. He didn’t want to let go of Veronica, fear and instinct demanding that he keep her close. Heather gently pushed him off. “I’ve got her, JD. She’s fine. I have her.”

He wouldn’t have let go for anyone else, but McNamara was the strongest of the Heathers, and he believed she could carry Veronica. Releasing Veronica was a relief as the pain finally began to recede.

The girl on the ground wasn’t moving, but no one went to check her pulse. Once Heather had Veronica’s arm over her shoulder, and her arms around her waist she nodded. “Let’s go.”

Duke led the way back up the stairs, Bud followed her, McNamara went next with Chandler and JD watching her back, since she was least able to defend herself. The hallways were dark and silent as they rushed through them. JD fought back flashbacks from other times he’d run through halls like these; once carrying a bomb and another time carrying Veronica as they fled a burning theater.

JD’s skin started to prickle strangely as they were walking. It felt like the moments before a thunderstorm, the air charged with electricity. “Guys… Something’s not right.”

They all turned to look at him. He stopped moving, needing to get a better sense of what was happening. Chandler stopped with him, but McNamara, Duke, and his father all kept going.

Realization hit him hard. “They’re coming. Run.”

Everyone tried to listen to him. McNamara made impressive progress, despite dragging Veronica along with her. JD and Chandler brought up the rear, ushering everyone forward as fast as possible.

When the spirits came into view, JD realized they probably didn’t stand much of a chance. “Heather! How’s Veronica?”

“Still out cold, she’s not going to be much help,” McNamara called back, out of breath from the effort.

JD glanced over his shoulder; the spirits were gaining on them. They didn’t stand a chance. They needed a distraction.

Veronica was going to kill him.

Chandler seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. She gritted her teeth and glanced at him. “Go.”

She stopped running and turned to face the spirits. Stretching her arms out, she prepared to fight them.

JD wanted to run away— knew that’s what this sacrifice was for—but he stood mesmerized by the image of Heather’s red silhouette, bright against the stark white of the halls and brilliant in the face of the smoke-like spirits.

Whatever she was doing did seem to be warding them, but not enough. It would never be enough to save her.

A spirit reached for her, seizing her arm and digging its claws into her skin. JD could imagine the barely visible blood, almost the same color as the sleeve it was staining. She would never make it.

Heather Chandler was going to die protecting them. Protecting him too.

No.

Heather fucking Chandler was not going to lay down her life to save his miserable ass. Abandoning all sanity and putting far too much faith in a story he’d been told as a child, he ran forwards to grab onto Heather.

The spirit shied away from him, his protective symbol more effective than he’d realized. With Heather freed, JD wrapped an arm around her and pulled her along with him. The others were long gone, and he relied on the meager protection of the coat to get them out.

Spirits swirled around them, but JD kept Heather close and trusted that the symbol his mother had put on his coat had the strength she’d believed it did. As close as the ghosts tried to get, they could never quite touch him.

The van was warded, so when he dove in, dragging a barely conscious Heather with him, the spirits were forced to stop. JD slammed the doors closed. “HEATHER, DRIVE!”

The wheels squealed against the pavement as they pulled out of the lot. They were safe.

JD finally had a chance to look down at Heather’s arm and what he saw almost choked him.

An enormous, deep gash ran all the way down Heather’s arm, bleeding freely and dangerously. Duke looked ill. “JD… what are we going to do? She’s too out of it to heal herself.”

Chandler was, indeed, barely conscious and far from coherent. She was in no shape to try to heal herself, or even to offer help. He was on his own. Panicking wasn’t an option, but he started to do it anyway. He couldn’t lose Heather. Not now, not after everything. “Stay with us, Heather.”

He turned and fumbled for her bag, still holding her wrist in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding. All he found was a mess of plants he couldn’t make sense of. At the very bottom of the bag, there were a few small glass bottles with various colored potions in them. He thought about grabbing one, forcing it down her throat, and hoping for the best, but decided against it. Who knew what poisonous shit Heather might be experimenting with.

There was only one option. Heather was bleeding out and there was no other way to save her. “I guess I’ll have to.”

Duke looked at him, eyes wide. “JD…” He knew what she was saying. He had little experience healing. He’d helped Chandler heal Michael, years ago, but he’d really only provided support. His powers allowed him to mirror other people’s abilities, if he was close to them. Heather had all the real power.

“I’ll heal her,” He repeated, almost trying to convince himself.

Bud snorted, unimpressed, “What the hell are you on about?”

The shook JD’s already weak confidence, but he pushed that away. Bud wasn’t the parent he needed right now. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sound and chaos of the van as it sped wildly down the street. Instead, he called to mind a library. He’d seen it in dreams and nightmares hundreds of times, and once when he’d needed it most. He needed it now.

 _Mom, if you’re there, somewhere; I need help. I need to save her._ He received no answer, just a sudden rush of warmth, a heightened belief in his own ability, and—faintly—the smell of perfume. With his hands on the wound, he pushed that feeling towards Heather. Behind his eyes, he could almost see or sense a faint red glow. Heather was trying to help him. Feeling her strength helped him focus and he poured even more power towards the wound, willing it to close.

Finally, he fell back, breathing like he’d run a marathon. He glanced down and found a thick white scar where there had been an open wound. He’d done it.

Duke’s eyes were round and bright. “Holy shit…”

Bud looked strangely angry, JD noticed, but he didn’t say anything. JD was relieved, he felt like he’d been swimming in the ocean during a storm. His entire body was sore and he just wanted to sleep.

The rode the rest of the way in silence, until Heather finally parked the car and came around to open the back doors for them. They were in the parking lot for a strange place advertising “Motel and Cabins”. McNamara and Duke lifted Chandler and held her between them. JD did his best to support Veronica, while also grabbing his bag. His shoulder throbbed angrily at the effort, but he ignored it.

The guy at the front desk was wearing headphones, but he looked up when they walked in. He stared at them—JD and Chandler were covered in each other’s blood, Bud with his missing eye and scars, and Duke and McNamara were dirty and obviously exhausted—and opened his mouth to ask them something. JD cut him off, slamming several bills down onto the counter between them. “I’ll give you four hundred dollars to not ask a single question.”

There was a long silence before the clerk swallowed and nodded. “They don’t pay me enough to ask questions. You can have cabin five.” He handed them a key and put his headphones back on.

The cabin had two bedrooms connected to a common space that was both living room and kitchen. They all filed into one of the bedrooms and JD eased Veronica onto the bed.

Heather was waking up, and she took in the sight of them through slightly glazed eyes. “We look like hell.”

“I’m pretty sure we just got back,” Duke answered, sinking onto a chair in the corner.

Bud started coughing and slid down the wall to sit on the floor while he waited for it to pass.

Chandler leaned against the wall, “Can you ward it? I’d like to know we’re safe.”

JD put as much energy as he had left into the wards on the windows, but he doubted they were as strong as they should be. Still, he left them like that, unable to be away from Veronica for any longer.

When he returned, McNamara was fussing over Chandler, who was tentatively flexing her scarred arm. “Not bad for an amateur,” She softened her words with a slight smile, and he nodded. She would have been able to do it without the scar, but at least she could still move it, though it looked stiffer than it had once been. Guilt gnawed at him, but confronting it would have taken more energy than he had.

He sat next to Veronica on the bed to wait for her to wake up. Slowly, everyone fell asleep where they were sitting, leaving only JD. He watched Veronica, occasionally reaching over to stroke her hair. He even began to drift off, once the reality of their escape had set in.

Veronica jerked awake sometime later, pulling him out of his half-sleep. She looked around wildly, “JD?”

He reached for her; pulling her into his chest and felt her arms come around him to cling to him as desperately as he held her. She trembled and he leaned down to kiss her hair, breathing in her smell. A slight awareness spread over him, and he realized she was pushing her soul out towards him. From it, for the first time, he got a clear message, accompanied by the impression of memories and emotions.

_I’m here. We’re together. We’re safe._


	8. Planning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is probably boring and nothing really happens? But I wanted to update and this felt like a logical place to split it, so I just went for it. Sorry if it's terrible. Enjoy

Veronica held on to JD. Still tired after all her efforts that day, she hadn’t managed to keep her soul pushed towards him for long, but she could tell he’d gotten her message. It had been comforting for her to call up those feelings and memories to send him, but this—just sitting in his arms—was far more so.

He bent down to kiss her and she let herself get lost in it for a little while. She couldn’t keep her hands off his face. By all logic, he shouldn’t even be alive. They’d been lucky that Heather was close enough and strong enough to fix him. JD seemed to be having similar feelings as his hands traced over her back. He moved to intensify the kiss and she had to pull back, wincing slightly. Her lip had split during the fight with Garnet and it was still more than a little sore. Kissing him had been worth it.

Thankfully, JD didn’t bother with apologies, he just rested his forehead against hers keeping her close. This felt somehow even more intimate than when they’d been kissing. They sat and drank in the miracle of being alive and together.

“You two do know that you’re not alone, right?” Duke asked.

McNamara snorted and stretched, rousing from her nap. “Yeah, like, we’re all still in here.”

“Including your dad,” Chandler added, gesturing to Bud who was still sleeping. Thank God. Bud had taken issue with JD showing affection in the past, though it might have just been the fact that JD had actual feelings. It had scared her when she was younger, but now it just pissed her off. Still, JD wouldn’t want to start something, though judging by the ginger way he held his shoulder something had gone down in that cell. She almost didn’t want to ask.

They all looked at Bud, whose breaths were still coming as a wheezing snore. Though he was obviously still asleep, JD moved away from Veronica, allowing a couple inches of space between them. Veronica wished he hadn’t.

“So,” JD started, “We need to catch up, and we need to make a plan.”

Chandler rolled her eyes, “No. What you need is a shower and a change of clothes. JD you’re covered in blood. So am I for that matter. We can talk after that.”

It was obvious that JD didn’t have the energy to argue with her, and he stood up to leave. Veronica went with him.

The cabin had two bathrooms, which was a gift considering there were six of them staying there. Veronica followed JD to the other bedroom. He made his way to the attached bathroom, but he paused at the door as he gingerly took off his shirt.

“Ronnie, will… Will you stay with me?” He looked so hesitant to ask, but she was relieved. She hadn’t wanted to be away from him.

Showering with JD was nothing new, though this was unusual context for them. She couldn’t remember ever having to wash this much blood off of him. It was hard not to gasp when she saw the bruises on his shoulder.

He noticed her reaction. “It’s fine, Ronnie. It doesn’t hurt that bad.”

It was tempting to believe him, but when she lightly ran her fingers over it, he flinched away. “JD, what happened in there?”

“My dad said… well… He told me I should leave you to die and just settle for one of the others,” He ducked his head, letting the water run over his face, clearing away the last traces of the blood that had been there.

Veronica snorted and he looked at her sharply. “Sorry, I was just imagining you dating Heather.” She didn’t specify which one she was talking about; it didn’t matter, it was hilarious regardless. “It might be a weird kind of compliment, he seems to think that all four of us are just dying to have you.” She

JD finally cracked a smile. “Even if they did, I would still want you.” He became serious, staring into her eyes. “It’s always been you, Veronica.”

“I know.” She stood on her toes to kiss him and he leaned into it. After that, they didn’t talk. They found other ways to reassure themselves that they were together again. JD brushed his fingers against the scars on her back and she kissed his neck.

They staggered out of the shower, stumbling over each other in their eagerness to forget the world for a little bit. They were both exhausted still, but nothing could have kept them apart.

Unable to make it as far as the bed, they ended up on the floor, JD with his arms around Veronica so they could be as close as physically possible.

She let a soft moan escape her when he was finally buried deep inside her. Nothing as complicated as fear could get to them when they were like this. Her whole world was this, him, and them. “I love you.”

After all these years of being together, he knew exactly the right way to move, and she knew everything he liked. “Shit, yes Veronica,” He groaned, breathing hard as he fell apart, still moving so she could fall over the edge with him.

Even though they both knew they didn’t have time to savor the moment, they tried to anyway. For just a couple minutes, they held each other in silence. Veronica breathed in the comforting smell of him, now slightly obscured by the scent of cheap motel soap. He kissed the top of her head. “We should go.”

“I know.”

Neither of them moved.

Finally, Veronica looked up at him. “Are you okay? I mean, with _him_ being here and all.”

JD nodded. “I’m fine as long as he doesn’t hurt any of you. That happens, and all bets are off.”

For all his bravado, Veronica doubted JD would kill his father. Though there had been a few deaths on their various hunts over the years, JD hadn’t had to pull the trigger on any of them. She knew how much it meant to him, that he hadn’t killed anyone since Kurt and Ram who’d probably deserved it. His father wasn’t worth breaking that record for. Not to mention the fact that despite everything he’d put JD through, JD didn’t hate his father.

He and Veronica were not in agreement on that matter. She was fairly confident that if it came down to it, she could and would murder Bud Dean. She didn’t say it though.

“He won’t hurt us. For now, at least, he needs us.”

JD nodded. “Speaking of, we should probably go back and join the others. You have a lot to tell us and they’ll be wondering where we are.”

Veronica snorted, “They know exactly where we are.” But she stood up anyway and threw on some clothes while JD did the same.

Before they walked out the door, she stopped him to kiss him one more time. “Our love is god.”

He smiled against her lips. “Our love is god.”

 

Bud was still asleep against the wall when they got back. All of the Heathers had wet hair and expressions that indicated they hadn’t appreciated being forced to wait for them.

“It’s about fucking time,” Duke deadpanned, glaring at them.

McNamara frowned, “Yeah, we were waiting for ages, we need to know what happened to you, Veronica.”

Chandler flexed her arm, and Veronica noticed a thick white scar she’d never seen before. Before she could ask about it, JD spoke up. “Is it… okay?”

Heather frowned, flexing it again, and Veronica noticed it didn’t move as much as it should. “It’s still stiff. There’s probably a lot of extra scar tissue in there which is keeping it from bending right.”

Veronica saw the guilt on JD’s face as Heather was talking. He swallowed hard. “I’m so sorry, Heather.”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that, I can get a surgeon to fix that if I can figure out a good story for how I got the scar.” She paused for a second, making a face like her next words tasted bitter. “Thank you for helping me, JD.”

He smiled, about to answer but Veronica interrupted. “Wait, _JD_ healed that?” She turned to look up at him, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“A lot happened, I guess it slipped my mind.” He shrugged.

Veronica glowered, “Slipped your mind? JD, this is huge! You—“

He stopped her, “I don’t even know if I could do it again. It just happened. One of those spirits got her and I had to do it because she couldn’t.”

Veronica didn’t press the issue, though she was tempted to. “Was there anything else—“

“Veronica, what the fuck happened when you were up there?” Duke cut in, not even letting Veronica finish her sentence. “We were locked in a cell, nothing happened except the most recent installment in JD’s daddy issues—“

“Fuck you, Heather.”

Duke continued as if JD hadn’t interrupted. “We want to know what happened when you were upstairs, before you died.”

Veronica chewed on her lip; she didn’t really want to talk about it. Most of her memories were still terrifyingly sharp in her mind, and they weren’t pretty pictures. But the others had a right to know what they were up against. “She wanted me to bring her sister back from the dead. She… Remember how Michael said there was a car accident a few days ago?” She looked up at JD, and he nodded. “A girl died. That was her sister, and she wanted me to bring her back.”

She tried hard to keep going, there was more to the story that they needed to hear, but her voice broke as the memory of the body came back. “She wanted me to bring her back, but, oh god… she was just a corpse. Broken and cold and—“ She choked on a sob, unable to keep going.

JD was there, wrapping his arms around her and holding her close. “Shh, Ronnie, it’s alright. You’ll be alright. Shh, I’m here.” He rubbed her back, and Veronica tried to accept his comfort, but the mental image wouldn’t go away.

Bud cut in, probably woken by her crying. “So why didn’t you give her what you want.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Chandler snapped, “You can’t just shove a soul into a body and hope for the best. A soul can’t stay in a body that’s sustained a deadly injury or illness. We fixed Michael, so it worked when Veronica put his soul back. That wouldn’t work on a body that was already days old.”

Veronica nodded, trying hard to collect herself. She didn’t want Bud to see her cry. “And I couldn’t find the soul. I think Jade— the sister—may have moved on. If she hasn’t, she wasn’t answering me when I went looking for her.”

There was a pause before Duke said, “That’s really interesting, but it doesn’t help us. Garnet is crazy and she controls all the evil ghosts, we have to do something about her.”

“We can’t!” Veronica insisted, “She’s just a scared, grieving teenager. She doesn’t know how to control her power—“

“She seemed pretty in control to me,” Chandler snapped, shoving her arm out so Veronica was forced to look at the scar. “And she seemed in control when she made that thing rip off JD’s face. You’re welcome for fixing him, by the way.”

Bud nodded, though no one was really paying attention to him. “The girl needs to be put down.”

Veronica gasped, as did the Heathers, and even JD seemed taken aback by Bud’s level tone. Veronica collected herself first. “We can’t do that. We can’t! She’s only a kid. She’s still in high school for fuck’s sake!”

Duke chewed on her lip. “I’m not saying we should kill her, but… well, there are some people you can’t save.”

“And there are some you can,” Veronica growled back. They all looked at her to keep talking, to explain herself but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She wasn’t sure of why she was defending Garnet so fiercely. Maybe it was the desperation in her eyes, maybe it was the words Veronica had overheard her saying to JD when she was sneaking up behind her, about being unloved and abandoned.

“I just… That girl has power, a lot of it. If we helped her, she could help others. She controls loose spirits, imagine what she could do facing a possessed person!” Veronica looked at JD, hoping that he, at least would back her up on this.

It felt like ages before he nodded. “She needs help. Veronica is right, she’s a scared kid who lost the only family she had.”

Veronica smiled, grateful for the support.

Duke wasn’t ready to agree just yet, though she wasn’t as ready to kill as Bud still clearly was. “All those spirits… Why were there so many of them? That looked like more than scared and desperate to me.”

This wasn’t going to be easy to explain. “Well, I think it’s because we’re on a sort of rift here, like we have in Sherwood, except this one isn’t warded. Anything can get in. What I think happened is that when Jade died, Garnet lost control of her power, the way I did when I thought JD was dead in Middleborough.”

Veronica looked around to make sure everyone was still following her before she went on. “But Garnet’s powers work differently than mine. When I lost control, I forced all those ghosts back into the spirit world. When Garnet lost control, I think she tore the rift even wider, making it easier for loose spirits to get into this realm. She controls them, for the most part, but if she were to lose control…”

“Chaos,” JD whispered, finishing her sentence.

Bud grunted something, and seemed like he was about to add to the conversation, but Chandler cut him off. “So we have to stop or help this girl, and we have to ward the rift that she created?”

She made it sound so simple. “Yes. But… Well, we don’t know how to create a ward. My grandma built them into the foundations of the hotel and the school, but we don’t exactly have the time to create a building.”

“Maybe there’s another way?” McNamara suggested.

Bud coughed hard, calling everyone’s attention to him. “It’d take a lot of power to make something like that.” He looked at the admittedly ragtag group around him. “Frankly, we don’t have that.”

“We’re more powerful than you think!” Chandler insisted.

Snorting, Bud shook his head. “Fixing a couple scratches is different, sweetheart.”

Veronica saw JD’s hands clench into fists, but he didn’t say anything. Chandler took a step away from Bud and didn’t respond.

“The girl, Garnet, might be able to help with that, though, right?” McNamara offered, her voice uncertain. “I mean, you all said she had power, and she made the thing, right? Maybe she can unmake it?”

JD nodded, “That’s a good point, Heather.”

“Okay,” Veronica said, making she her voice sounded more confident than she felt. “So the first thing we have to do is get Garnet.”

“And convince her to help us,” Duke added.

Veronica smiled. “Exactly.”

Chandler raised one eyebrow. “Even though she thinks it’s your fault that her sister is still dead?”

Grinding her teeth together, Veronica muttered, “Yes.”

Even JD seemed to doubt her. “And you attacked her?”

She glared at him. “Yes.”

Bud pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a long drink. “Sounds like this plan isn’t going to work.”

Unable to take any more, Veronica turned on him. “Fuck you!” And she stormed out of the room.

 


	9. Planning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have a good author's note for this, my head hurts really bad and I need sleep but I have an essay to finish so... yeah, anyway here's a short chapter. I promise the action will come back soon! Enjoy!

JD took another sip of the tea Heather had given him, trying hard not to grimace. He was grateful to her for making it, and whatever it was definitely helped his shoulder, but that didn’t quite make up for the taste.

Heather had made the tea as they’d settled in for an intense research session with the few books and diaries JD and Veronica had brought with them. Hours later, they had almost no new information on how to create a ward. JD turned the page again and held the page close to his face, trying to make out Veronica’s grandmother’s delicate, loopy handwriting.

“Is anyone hungry?” Duke asked, tossing her book aside and pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Yes!” JD groaned, and chorus of voices were quick to agree with him.

Veronica set her book aside and stretched. “I say we order pizza and take a break.”

No one argued, so Duke dug around the hotel information book until she found a list of places that delivered. She called the first one advertising pizza and ordered enough food for a group twice their size.

As he had since they’d gotten here, Bud seized his food when it arrived and took refuge on the couch in the living room, leaving the bedrooms to everyone else. No one spoke to him, or even acknowledged his presence if there was any way to avoid doing so.

None of them had missed the fact that he hadn’t thanked them for coming to rescue him, or the fact that he had gotten them into this mess.

Now that the research had been put aside, they all became more casual, and the terror from earlier that day slipped away. Veronica had even taken to telling some of the stories from their hunts.

“So, here I am, hiding behind this enormous fucking clown statue, while JD is just trying to get him closer to me so I can get him un-possessed. But this goddamn ghost is inside a guy who’s tripping on acid, so he keeps trying to jump over things that aren’t even there, and he’s running everywhere.” Everyone was laughing so hard at Veronica’s story there were tears coming out of their eyes. “Finally, he’s close enough and I jump out at him, manage to get the ghost out, so I jump in the spirit world—“

JD took over the story, “But she didn’t even think that she was leaving me, stuck in that goddamn amusement park with a dead body and one very unconscious addict. So when I hear sirens, I’m positive that this is it for me, and I have no idea what to do. I’m thinking I’m going to have to try to make a run for it with Veronica’s body in my arms.”

Duke snorted, “That’s not suspicious at all.”

“Exactly! Thankfully, Veronica woke up before the police actually found us, but we had to hide in the fun house for four hours before they finally left.”

“Oh my god, do not tell me you guys had sex in there!” Chandler shrieked.

JD was about to deny when he looked at Veronica and saw that her flush was giving them away. He rapidly changed the subject. “Anyway, that’s why I’m never doing a job in Florida again. Ever.”

“That has to be the most crime filled story I’ve ever heard,” McNamara said, sounding shocked and a little impressed.

“You need to let me recommend some books, Heather,” Duke muttered, taking a long drink from her diet coke. When she was finished, she eyed JD and Veronica. “Speaking of crime, what I really want to know is where you guys got all that cash? You had four hundred dollars on hand to bribe the guy at the desk, and then you tipped the pizza guy a frankly absurd amount. There’s no way Veronica makes enough book money to cover that kind of thing.”

Veronica looked at JD, her dark eyes sparkling with humor. “Should we tell them?”

JD shrugged. “We were going to have to eventually.” He took a deep breath, pausing for effect before admitting, “We go to casinos and use ghosts to cheat at cards.”

There was a beat of silence before Chandler whispered, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Veronica giggled. “Nope. We did a job in Vegas a while back and needed some quick cash. I suggested it as a joke, but JD liked the idea so we did it.”

“You’d be shocked at how many ghosts are willing to help with that kind of thing; they think it’s fun,” JD added.

Both Chandler and Duke looked a little put out. “I make a teacher’s salary! I can’t believe you never offered to share!”

Everyone knew that both Chandler and Duke still used their parents’ money. Hell, Duke’s parents still owned her house; they just never lived there anymore. Despite their small salary, neither of them was exactly struggling.

Still, “There’s nothing stopping you guys from doing it too,” He suggested.

Chandler sighed, “Ghosts never want to do anything for me, I think they only listen to real mediums like Veronica.”

“Really? I have a ghost that hangs around the library and helps me track down books.” Duke shrugged as if having a dead assistant librarian was perfectly normal, which—when JD thought about it—was kind of true for them.

The girls moved on to other topics, so JD gathered the plates and brought them into the kitchen. On his way back, he passed his father sitting on the couch. “Jason.”

JD stopped, but didn’t walk any closer to Bud. “What?”

Bud stood with some difficulty and went to stand next to JD. They were both facing the open doorway, through which they could see the girls sitting on the floor and laughing. “She’s your weakness.”

JD clenched his hands into fists at his sides. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That girl makes you weak. You threw yourself at that thing in the basement with no hesitation just because it touched her. You nearly died. We have rules to prevent shit like this.”

Just that word ‘rules’ made JD shudder, remembering hands that gripped too tight and fists used to make a point. Still, JD couldn’t actually argue; nothing Bud was saying was technically untrue. Except for one thing. “It’s not a weakness.” Bud glared, but JD plowed on. “You’re right. I would die for Veronica but that’s not a weakness, because she would die for me too. Fuck, she has died for me on multiple occasions. It isn’t weakness when it’s mutual.”

Bud snorted, “And what exactly are you offering her with all her fancy powers? If she can do everything she’s talked about doing, why would she need you?”

“Because she can do everything she’s talked about doing,” JD answered simply. “The laws of nature get a little fuzzy when she’s around, that’s why she needs me. Someone needs to be there to make sure she doesn’t bring people back from the dead who should stay that way. She’s not a god, but without someone to watch her back, she could be.”

Though he looked ready to say something else, a cough kept Bud from arguing with JD further.

“But I don’t expect you to understand that,” JD turned away so he could rejoin Veronica and the girls. Though there was no way she could have overheard their conversation, Veronica seemed to know that he needed her and she rested her head on his shoulder as soon as he sat down.

“Look,” Duke said, “I don’t want to bring down the mood or anything, but we do need to figure out what we’re going to do about all this. We should try to synthesize our research and see if we came up with anything useful. We might be able to work out a plan.”

McNamara raised her hand as if they were all back in a classroom, waiting for permission to speak. “I read something about wards reflecting emotions?”

Veronica ran her fingers through her hair absentmindedly. “Maybe wards get their strength from emotions? That would explain using a high school and a hotel; lots of people and lots of feelings…” She trailed off and looked at JD.

He shrugged; this was hardly his area of expertise. “There might be a symbol that can do that, but I’m not sure what it is. Emotions give things strength, sure, but usually it’s just the emotions of the person creating it, like the protective symbols I use or Heather’s potions. I don’t know how to make a symbol that absorbs strength from everyone around it.”

It was Duke’s turn to look thoughtful. “You know, when we first figured out what Kim could do, I looked up empathy spells to see if there was any way to help her control it. I might have seen something about symbols tied to emotion. That could help, right?”

Chandler shrugged. “It’s better than nothing. I’ll give Laura a call and see if she can track it down. If not, maybe Kim knows where it is, assuming she’s not still mad.” She stood up to make her way to the phone.

Even JD had to admit that Heather’s attitude was a little callous. He’d hated Kurt, but Kim hadn’t known him like they did. She had a right to mourn her brother, even though he thought the idea of anyone missing someone like Kurt was rather gross.

Gesturing to his abandoned mug, Heather asked him if he needed more tea. He shook his head. “It’s feeling a lot better, thanks.”

“That tea only treats symptoms, so whatever damage you did is still there. Don’t do anything crazy.” She frowned at him for a long second, then turned away.

JD didn’t bother to mention that he hadn’t damaged the shoulder. It would only turn the conversation in an unpleasant direction. His mind was still reeling from his conversation with Bud, and he didn’t feel the need to rehash it with the others. Maybe if he found a quiet moment tonight, he would tell Veronica, but the others didn’t need to know.

Chandler returned from her call a few minutes later. “She’s going to look for the book for us. I’m told that things in Sherwood are calm and we shouldn’t feel the need to hurry back. Oh, and Veronica, your parents have called twice. They want to talk to you.”

Reaching out and grabbing Veronica’s hand, JD gave it a supportive squeeze. Veronica sighed. “I’ll have to talk to them eventually, even if it’s just to cut ties.” She looked so sad about it JD squeezed her hand again. “But maybe it can wait until after we deal with Garnet?”

The others all nodded, and Duke muttered—very audibly— “JD’s family problems are enough for now, thank you very much.”

“Shut up, Heather.”

He and Veronica had said it at the exact second, which was enough to get her smiling. It didn’t last, though. “When it comes time to face Garnet, I think only JD and I should go.”

“What?” Chandler demanded, “Absolutely not! What happens if one of you gets hurt?”

“What happens if you get hurt?” Veronica replied, her voice barely above a whisper. “Any of you? I would go alone if I thought there was any chance of convincing JD to stay behind, but I know there’s not. She has incredible power, and very poor control. The best thing to do is minimize the amount of damage she could cause in case all of this goes wrong.”

“So why you?” Duke asked, narrowing her eyes.

JD sighed, wishing he didn’t already know that it had to be Veronica, and why. “Because Veronica knows what she’s going through better than any of the rest of us.” Though JD could certainly relate to Garnet’s feelings of loss and abandonment, he prided himself on never intentionally triggering potentially apocalyptic events because of them.

Only Veronica could really understand what it was like to live with that kind of power. Every since Michael, Veronica had walked a dangerous balance of staying in control. JD helped with that, keeping her from going over the edge, but he knew there were many times when she struggled to stay in line.

The last job they’d done had ended in a death. The body had been found before they’d even arrived in town, but Veronica had wanted to revive him anyway. She’d insisted that medical documents could be forged; people would call him a miracle and never think twice. She’d been so desperate, he’d almost given in. But he hadn’t. He’d pulled her close while she begged him to let her save this dead stranger, and he’d whispered words that had saved him once, years ago. “If you go on like this, you’ll lose your soul.”

She’d understood, and hadn’t asked about reviving the guy again. After the spirit was defeated, she disappeared, and he found her at the graveyard, leaving flowers by his tombstone.

There was a silence after JD’s declaration, and he was pulled back to the present when he realized how long it had gone on. He wrapped an arm around Veronica, “We’ll go, you guys stay here and focus on finding a way to fix the ward.”

A rasping, wheezing cough sounded from the other room, loud enough that everyone jumped. Chandler stood up, responding instinctively to illness. Though JD was tempted to stop her, she crossed the room to check on Bud.

JD and Veronica followed cautiously behind.

Bud was slumped over the couch, his face so pale it appeared gray in the harsh fluorescent light. For the first time in his life, JD looked at his father and saw age.

Though he tried to swat Heather’s hands away, she managed to get close enough to check his pulse and put a hand on his chest to feel for breathing. Bud coughed again, startling Heather and making her step back a little.

She looked up at JD with wide eyes. “JD, I don’t know how to say this… I— I think your father is dying.”


	10. Rule One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone who reads this is wonderful and I love you. Thank you all for your comments and your support. I hope you didn't mind the wait for this chapter. Its really long and I hope that makes up for it. Enjoy!

Veronica watched as JD raked a hand through his hair and began to pace. “That’s not possible.”

Chandler looked at Veronica seeking help. When she didn’t get any she sighed. “It is possible, JD. It’s happening.”

“Well can’t you fix it?”

She put an indignant hand on her hip. “JD, I’m a witch, not a doctor. He’s sick, all I can tell is there’s something wrong with his lungs. He needs a hospital.”

“No. No, absolutely not.” The panic in his voice was sharper than glass, and Veronica responded to it instinctively, crossing the room to take his hand.

It was enough to stop his pacing, and he pulled her closer, muttering a faint, “What the fuck?” Into her hair.

She didn’t have a good answer for him, but she let him hold her as long as he needed to.

When he pulled away, Chandler was waiting to continue berating him. “If you don’t want him to go to the hospital—“

“I can’t. He’ll kill me. Either you fix it, Heather, or we just…”

_Let him die._ The words hung, unspoken, in the air between the five of them. No one asked what JD’s dad had against hospitals; it didn’t matter. He coughed again, wheezing loudly and startling them all. His eyes didn’t open, which was something of a relief. Veronica didn’t want his input complicating the issue.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Duke whispered.

Everyone turned and stared at her until she elaborated. “Garnet is still out there with her army of evil. We need to do something about it.”

There was a long, weighted pause before Veronica said, “I can do it.” No one rushed to stop her, so she kept going. “I can go talk to Garnet by myself.”

“No.” JD’s answer was unsurprising., and his tone suggested he wouldn’t be persuaded to change his mind. “We stick to the plan. Veronica and I will go—“

Chandler’s eyebrows lifted, “And what, we just stay here and take care of _him_?” She spoke of Bud with undisguised disgust. “Not likely.”

“I have to go,” Veronica said, “You can’t argue with that.”

JD dragged his hand through his hair again and resumed pacing. “Sure, fine. You have to go, but I’m going with you.”

Chandler opened her mouth to protest, but Duke stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Don’t bother. You know how they are. They’re not going to let us come with and we’ll only end up getting mad at each other. Let’s cut the bullshit and just let them go. Someone should stay with…” Duke trailed off, unable to find a harsh enough nickname for Bud.

Reluctantly, Chandler shut her mouth and went back to poking Bud experimentally in the chest. “Heather, get my bag. I doubt there’s much I can do, but at least I’ll get some practice in.”

Everyone flinched back at the callousness of those words, but no one said anything against it. Veronica thought that Chandler was the only person in the room who was being completely honest about their feelings.

Chandler took her bag from McNamara and started rooting through it, occasionally pulling out plants. Veronica watched her for a minute, fascinated by the focus on her face, but her eyes drifted back to JD, who was slipping out of the room without a word.

She took a deep breath and followed him. It was always impossible to tell when he wanted to be alone, and when he shouldn’t be. She could only hope she was guessing right.

He was climbing out the window of their room. “JD?”

Turning sharply, he almost fell over because his leg was halfway out of the window frame. She crossed her arms. “Going somewhere?”

“No.” He glanced back towards the window, not meeting her eyes. “I just needed some air.”

“Can I come with?”

“Please do.”

Veronica followed JD out the window and they settled down on the ground, sitting against the wall, illuminated by light from the open window. Huddling in the bushes outside the cabin felt like an entirely different world.

It was a relief to be alone with JD. They’d gotten used to it being just the two of them, and she was finding everyone else a bit overwhelming. She could tell he felt the same way.

They sat in silence for a while. Veronica didn’t try to pressure JD to talk. Eventually he would.

His voice was hoarse when he finally spoke. “I don’t even know how to think about it.”

She reached over and took his hand. “It’s okay if you’re not sad.” Veronica knew she wasn’t sad, but JD’s feelings about his father had always been complicated.

“It’s more than just not being sad. I wish… Fuck, Veronica, I wish I hated him.”

Veronica wanted to tell him that he should hate Bud— that he had every reason to— but she knew that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. She stayed silent.

“I should hate him,” JD continued. “He deserves it. I know he does. But all I can think is that… that sometimes he was right.”

“He wasn’t—“ Veronica started to speak but JD cut her off.

“He was, sometimes. He taught me everything I know, and I know I would have died without some of the stuff I learned from him.” JD raked his hand through his hair, and Veronica noticed him searching through his pockets, a habit leftover from when he smoked. She didn’t blame him for wanting a cigarette right now. She kind of wanted one too.

JD shrugged. “I guess… if he was right about that stuff, I wonder if he could have been right about other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

He looked away from her, suddenly fascinated by the leaves on the bush next to him. “That I’m weak. That you… never mind.”

Veronica squeezed his hand. “I don’t believe he’s right about you, and I know for a fact that he doesn’t know a damned thing about me, or about us, JD.” She rested her head on his shoulder.

For a long time, JD sat and mulled that over. Veronica kept her head on his shoulder and came close to drifting off a couple times.

“Ronnie?”

“Mhm?” She lifted her head to look at him, taking in his tired eyes, messy, uncut hair, and the shadow of a beard that had started along his jaw.

He paused to stare back at her, giving her time to wonder how she looked through his eyes. “When you said no… I mean, when I asked you—“

She nodded, remembering the one and only time they’d seriously discussed marriage, about a year after they’d first packed up the station wagon and left Sherwood.

“Did you say no because you thought I might be like him?”

There was nothing he could have said that would have shocked her more. “JD, I would marry you right here, right now, just to prove to you that that isn’t true. I would still think it was a little silly and pointless, but if that’s what it took, I would absolutely do it.” She reached up and held onto his jaw to make sure he was looking her in the eyes. “You are nothing like him.”

“But we fight, Veronica, and my parents…” Once again, he dragged his hand through his hair, pulling far harder than necessary. She caught his hand to keep him from doing it again.

“Have you ever been mad enough where you thought you’d hurt me?” It was an absurd question, and she already knew the answer to it, but she knew he needed to understand.

“What? No! Never, Veronica, I wouldn’t—“

“Exactly,” she interrupted. “You never would. No matter how angry you got, you would never hurt me. You aren’t like him.”

“But we argue…” He repeated, sounding wretched.

“Of course we fight, JD; we live together in a station wagon. It’s normal for couples to fight.” She kept her tone level and her eyes on him.

Though still obviously distressed, he looked at her with an almost childlike hopefulness. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m positive. JD… how long have you been worried about this?” She reached up to brush her fingers over his damp cheek.

JD looked away. “Since you said no, and then after Georgia. He almost hit you, and I remembered my mom and… God, Ronnie, I just don’t want to be like him.”

“You aren’t. You never will be. I love you, JD. And I trust you. You would never hurt me. That’s not who you are.” She squeezed his hand and pushed her soul out towards him, trying to make him feel all of her love and trust, and how deep her conviction was: _you would never hurt me_.

He gasped audibly, and she knew it worked. Twining their fingers together, she pulled him close so she could rest her forehead on his. JD kissed her, snapping the connection, but creating an entirely new one. One hand cradled the back of her head, and the other rested lightly on her hip.

They probably wouldn’t have stopped under normal circumstances, but they heard the sound of Bud coughing drift through the open window. JD pulled away.

“We should go back and get ready.”

Veronica sighed and held his hand a little tighter. “We don’t have to go yet. Let’s wait until morning. Please? I’m still tired from the last fight.” This was a lie, but she didn’t feel bad about it. Her powers were fully restored from her last encounter with Garnet, but she knew there was no other way to get JD to wait.

“Okay, a few more hours probably won’t hurt.”

The conversation ruined the few moments of peace they’d found, so they both stood up and brushed themselves off before climbing back through the window. Veronica followed JD into the main room, where Duke was reading, Chandler was hovering over Bud, and McNamara was fluttering around awkwardly as if unsure what her place was.

“How is he?” JD asked, his voice blank and unreadable.

Chandler sighed and put a hand on her hip. “I got him to wake up a couple times, but he kept calling me Alice, so I don’t think he was really there.”

JD winced. His mother was a healer with short blond hair, Bud was delirious and only had one eye, the confusion made some sense, even if it was fucked up.

“I was right,” Heather continued, “That the problem is in his lungs. From what I can tell, he can barely breathe; I don’t know how he managed to stay alive in that basement, much less run when we were escaping. JD, you know I hate him, but I have to admire his will to survive. Not that it’s going to help him. His brain isn’t getting enough oxygen.”

All traces of whatever relaxation their brief escape had offered him disappeared. “Is there anything you can do?”

Heather sighed, “I’m doing the best I can to make his breathing easier, but I’m just prolonging the inevitable. At this point I don’t even think an actual doctor could help.”

Duke closed her book and stood up, crossing the room to look apathetically down at Bud. “You tried Heather, that’s what counts.”

“Why can’t Veronica just bring him back if he dies?” McNamara asked.

“When someone dies because they’re possessed, the problem is their soul. Bud’s body is the problem; it’s getting too deteriorated to hold a soul. Honestly, if this goes on much longer, I think the best option would be…” She trailed off, not sure if she could actually say the words out loud.

“He would want that,” JD insisted, understanding what she hadn’t said.

Duke didn’t. “Want what?”

“A mercy kill,” JD said grimly, “Veronica could force his soul out of his body, killing him quickly and painlessly. If it comes down to it, that’s the right thing to do.”

Veronica fought down nausea at the idea. She’d never killed anyone, and she didn’t exactly want to. She would, if JD or one of the Heathers’ lives depended on it, but that didn’t mean she was at ease with the idea. But she also knew that JD was right about it being what Bud would want.

Mercy. Funny how the word sounded so similar to the word murder.

“Not now though. I need to save my strength until after we’ve dealt with Garnet, just in case. After that’s over… I’ll do it after.”

JD nodded, and no one else argued with her. It was a relief. She knew she could kill Bud if it meant protecting JD, but this was different; there was no way he could hurt anyone when he was this sick.

As if to prove her thought correct, Bud coughed again, a horrible, high pitched scraping sound that was painful to listen to. JD flinched visibly while Chandler immediately started digging through her bag again.

Stepping slightly closer to the couch, JD leaned over his father, looking tragic and lost. Before Veronica could go to him, Bud reached up and seized JD’s arm. He pulled his son closer to the couch and rasped, “What the fuck…” A loud fit of coughing interrupted him, obscuring what the sentence might have been; all Veronica could discern was the word “Rules”.

Finally, the coughing stopped, and Bud passed out again and his hand slipped off of JD’s arm. Bud’s breath was still audible and labored but less horrible than it had been.

They stared at him for a while, waiting for him to pop up again. After some time had passed and he remained still, Chandler cleared her throat. “You two should get some sleep if you can.”

Neither JD nor Veronica tried to argue with her. They both filed out of the room and into their bedroom.

As they lay on the bed, Veronica thought it would be impossible to sleep after the day they’d had, but once JD had his arms around her she found herself drifting off.

 

What felt like minutes later, JD was shaking her awake. “C’mon darling, we have to go. We have to save the world, remember?”

Veronica murmured something and tried to roll over, but he kept his hand on her shoulder. “Ronnie, you need to get up.”

She managed to open one eye, and the light felt like daggers but she woke up enough to remember that they had a mission. Sitting up, she rubbed her eyes. “We really have to go save the world, don’t we?”

JD almost smiled. “Yeah, we do.”

“But it’s so early,” She groaned. Despite her words, she hauled herself out of bed and pulled on some clothes.

The Heathers were all asleep in the second bedroom when they emerged. Bud was on the couch, asleep but breathing loudly. His face was a strange shade of waxy gray. Veronica tried not to look at him for too long. She had always known he wouldn’t make it, but something about his pallor finally convinced her that she was going to have to kill him soon after they got back. There was nothing else they could do.

JD barely glanced at Bud as he gathered up his supplies. “Should we leave them a note?”

Veronica shook her head. “They know we’re going. If we don’t come back… well, a note wouldn’t do much about that.”

He nodded and pulled a knife and a gun out of his bag. She didn’t comment on his weapons, instead pulling her knife out of the spirit realm. Its familiar weight was oddly comforting.

They drove to the school in silence, holding hands, faces set and stony as they stared forward, ready to face whatever they found.

The basement was as eerie as Veronica remembered, and still uncomfortably similar to the one at Westerburg. Neither of them commented on the parallels.

The dungeon hadn’t changed either. The torches still flickered and illuminated the ancient walls, leaving the cells in shadow. Behind one of the doors, Veronica could sense the gateway Garnet had opened. She moved towards it, pulled by the dark energy that radiated off of it.

“I didn’t think you’d come back.”

Veronica almost didn’t recognize the voice that had startled her because it was so changed. The practiced grandiosity was gone, in its place was something hollow, broken.

“Garnet?” She approached the voice carefully, keeping one hand wrapped tightly around the hilt of her knife and. To get closer to the source of the noise, she had to get closer to the gateway.  

She finally located her, and found something far different from what she’d expected. The girl who only yesterday had been manic and wild with power was shrunken, pale, and broken. Her short, dark hair was lank and unkempt, making her eyes look huge in her hollow cheeks. “I couldn’t save her…”

Veronica still felt oddly wary; this was too much of a change from the way Garnet had been yesterday. But sympathy was hard to fight when faced with someone as pathetic as Garnet looked right now. She stepped a little closer to the huddled girl. “Garnet, I know you tried to save her. You did everything you could.”

The poor girl had done everything she could have. She had held people hostage, had been willing to kill people to bring back her sister. The realization that nothing could must have crushed her.

Veronica’s grip on her knife loosened.

Behind her, she could feel JD hovering nearby, and she could sense the tension rolling off of him. She tried to ignore him.

Garnet turned her strange, wide eyes up to Veronica. “I should kill you.”

Immediately, Veronica tightened her hold on her knife, ready to strike if she had to. Her attention, however, was drawn upwards as two loose spirits formed behind Garnet, coalescing out of smoke and darkness.

Calmly, Veronica held up her hand. “Go from this place, you are not welcome.”

The spirits vanished, but only for a second. Two more took their place, or perhaps the same ones reformed. They looked the same and there was no way to tell.

“They’ll keep coming,” Garnet wailed, “No matter how much I try to make them go, they keep coming. I hear them, Veronica. I hear them whisper my name. They want me. I’m one of them!”

“Don’t listen to them, Garnet,” JD cut in, stepping forward. “You can’t listen to them. You’re human; you’re powerful. You are in control of them.”

Veronica took over, “You can stop them, Garnet. You can make them all go back. You can close the door, just like you opened it.” She couldn’t keep the desperate hope out of her voice as she noticed another spirit appear in the room.

Garnet was shaking. “I cant! I can’t! I tried but they keep coming back. I just want them GONE!” Her final scream seemed to tear something, and Veronica could swear she felt the floor shake under her feet.

Suddenly, there was no way to count the spirits in the room. There were too many. They were everywhere, overwhelming Veronica’s senses and pulling her attention everywhere at once as she tried to make them go.

She could hear the whispers too now.

_Veronica…_

Her name, hissed like fog over ice, intermixed with words that created dangerous ideas in her head. Images of ropes around her neck, of JD holding a bomb and Westerburg in flames. Memories and things that might have happened mixed and tangled until she couldn’t tell what was real.

JD, too, must have heard the whispers, because he was on his knees, cradling something she couldn’t see. His eyes were empty, but he had a gun in his hand.

It was the gun that brought her out of it, combined with JD’s eyes looking like they had only once before in all the time she’d known him. He wasn’t holding a bomb this time, but he might as well have been.

“NO!”

Veronica’s scream, like Garnet’s, tore through the room, banishing all the spirits and making the ground shake. She could feel them trying to come back but she had weakened them.

“Garnet, you need to do something. I can’t control them as well as you; you need to make them go! You can do this!”

The girl hugged her knees and screwed up her face, Veronica put one gentle hand on her white-knuckled fist, adding what little strength she could.

“The mouth of hell will never close, the mouth of hell will never close,” Garnet whispered, over and over, almost too fast to be intelligible.

Behind her, JD was still staring blankly and though she wanted to go to him, she kept her whole focus on Garnet. “You can do this. You have strength you don’t even know about. You have to beat them, so that you can live. So that you can change the world. You can close it, Garnet. You can!”

Garnet screamed, power tearing out of her as her face went pale and she bit her lip until it bled. It wasn’t working. Though the energy seemed to flicker, the gate remained, and spirits were starting to emerge from it again.

Suddenly, JD was behind her. “Take care of the spirits, I can boost her!” Removing Veronica’s hands from Garnet’s, he took her place, kneeling in front of the girl.

It helped. JD’s powers picked up on Garnet’s and added to them. The door flickered, wavered. For a moment, Veronica allowed herself to hope that they’d won.

A spirit got ahold of her. The burning, tearing pain filled her whole soul and brought her to her knees, screaming.

It ruined JD’s focus and he let go of Garnet to check on her. Whatever progress they had made evaporated and the gateway reopened, as strong as it had been before.

JD crouched next to Veronica, trying to get her to sit up. She hadn’t even noticed when she’d fallen to the ground. “JD… help… her.” She managed to gasp the words out as she used what little strength she had left to stay upright.

Before JD could go back to Garnet, she stood up. Veronica could feel power radiating off the girl, stronger now than it had been when JD was amplifying it. She looked at them with eyes that were far too bright, almost feverish. “I can’t close it. But I can hold it. Not for long. Days, maybe. I can buy you days.”

Veronica understood before JD. “No, you can’t! Garnet, you’ll die!”

“Do you think I’ll see Jade?”

Neither JD nor Veronica had an answer for her, and she didn’t bother to wait for one. Her body fell to the floor like a discarded coat, leaving her soul standing in its place. Slowly, Garnet drifted towards the gate, seeming to fill it entirely.

The spirits faded, pulled back towards the spirit realm as Garnet filled the space and blocked the gate.

The room was silent.

“Go.”

Garnet’s soul didn’t exactly speak the words, but Veronica sensed them nonetheless. Bowing her head at the sacrifice, Veronica helped JD get to his feet, and together the two of them staggered up the stairs and away from the school.

The van was a comfort. Veronica collapsed into the seat, fighting tears. In the last moments, as Garnet gave all of her soul to hold the gate closed for just a few more days, Veronica had seen it. She had seen the girl’s soul.

She’d seen memories of a cruel woman—Garnet’s mother—ranting about having an evil daughter with evil powers.   She had seen Garnet’s pain, rage, and grief when her mother had abandoned her daughters, leaving Garnet to take care of her sister alone. And she had seen the fierce love Garnet felt for Jade. The endless dedication to protecting her.

She’d seen the car that ruined it all, hitting Jade and driving away. She had felt the horror, pain, and rage that had opened the gate in the first place.

Unable to process Garnet’s pain along with her own, Veronica passed out.

When she woke up, she was on the bed in the hotel room, and JD wasn’t with her. Night was falling, which meant hours had gone by since she and JD had left the school.

Dizzy and confused, Veronica staggered out to the main room where she found the Heathers, pale and tired sitting in the corner.

The couch where Bud had been was covered in a sheet, and Veronica could no longer hear his breathing.

“Oh my god…”

Chandler nodded, and McNamara walked over to put an arm around Veronica’s shoulders, helping her walk to the opposite side of the room where they were sitting.

“When we woke up, he was dead and you guys were gone,” Chandler informed her simply. Her hair was messy and her eyes were rimmed in dark purple shadows.

“Where’s JD?” Veronica was still confused, but she knew JD needed her right now. Why hadn’t he woken her up?

Duke sighed, “He left when he came home and found his dad like this. He said he needed some air. I’m sorry, Veronica, I should have stopped him.”

“It’s fine,” Veronica whispered, not really meaning it but saying it because she knew it was expected. “He’ll come back.”

 

He did, nearly an hour later, stumbling in and slurring an apology, barely sparing a glance for the body on the couch. He dropped to the ground next to Veronica.

McNamara leaned over to Chandler, “What’s wrong with him?”

“Put simply?” Chandler said, “Jason Dean is Jason drunk.”

And he was. Very, very drunk.

He put his head on Veronica’s shoulder. “I hated him, Ronnie, I hated him.”

“I know.” She brushed her fingers through his hair, trying to soothe him.

He kept going, and she noticed tears sliding down his face. “He hurt her, and I hated him, and she died, and he just left. He left. She doesn’t even have a tombstone.” He buried his head in her hair. “They’re gone.”

“Shh, JD, I’m here, it’s okay.” She continued stroking his hair, and watched the Heathers leave them alone. “It’s okay, JD.”

JD nodded, but didn’t lift his head. He babbled something else, but the words were too slurred for her to understand them. The last words she could make out before he fell asleep were, “It was rule fucking one, Ronnie. Rule fucking one.”


	11. Drifting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was meant to be a bit of a breather chapter as we transition into the next significant part of this story, but there was so much to deal with. I hope you don't mind emotions and my clumsy attempts at dialogue writing. Enjoy!

JD woke up feeling like shit. His mouth was dry and tasted foul and his head ached. Veronica wasn’t with him, though he dimly remembered that he’d fallen asleep on her.

Rolling awkwardly to his feet, JD tried to avoid looking at the couch, where the body—his father’s body—was still covered with a sheet. They were going to have to do something about that.

Veronica was sitting on the counter in the small kitchen area. Heather McNamara was cooking while Chandler fiddled with something in a glass.

When she saw he was awake, Veronica crossed the room and hugged him. For a minute, he let himself forget about everything they had to be upset about and leaned into her.

Over Veronica’s head, Chandler pushed the glass into his face. It was full of a suspiciously blue liquid. He didn’t take it immediately and Chandler sighed. “You look like shit, I’m sure you feel worse. Drink this.”

He hesitated for a second before obligingly taking the glass from Heather and drinking it. Surprisingly, he felt better almost immediately. His head felt clearer and stopped hurting.

“Wow, he looks less dead,” Duke said, glancing up from her book.

Everyone flinched, suddenly remembering the body in the other room.

Veronica stepped back, her eyes drifting towards the couch. “We’re going to have to do something about that.”

“Should we… I don’t know, bury him or something?” McNamara offered.

“No.” JD answered. “Ghost hunters don’t get funerals.”

None of them could have known what he was talking about except for Veronica, who said nothing. She wrapped her hand around his and nodded. He was grateful for her silent show of support, as the others seemed to think he’d lost his mind.

In the end, they dumped him in the ocean. McNamara and JD tossed him off a pier and then they walked away. No one said any words, and no one stayed to watch the body float away.   They piled into the van and drove back to the motel in silence.

It was Duke, nearly an hour after they returned, who finally broke the silence. “What now?”

JD didn’t have an answer. He still felt like he was falling, hurtling towards the ground faster than he could process. Veronica’s constant presence at his side kept him sane, but he still couldn’t think beyond immediate needs.

Ignoring the question, JD crossed the room to pick up his father’s discarded jacket. A book fell from one of the pockets as he started to take it to the trash.

Veronica picked it up and held it out to him. He’d seen it before, of course, but hadn’t given it any kind of thought in years. Shaking his head, he pushed the book back towards Veronica. “I don’t think… You should probably look at it first.”

She nodded and flipped the book open. “It’s a pretty poor excuse for a journal. It’s just dates and quick explanations of what happened.” She glanced up at JD before flipping several pages, searching for a specific date.

“September thirtieth, 1989— Jason possessed, leaving Sherwood.”

JD flinched a little at that account of how things had happened all those years ago, but he nodded for Veronica to go on. She flipped through a few more pages. “October thirty-first, 1989—Jason survived, is hunting same spirit.” That was from when they’d tried to save Jeremy and had happened to run into Bud at a convenience store late at night. Bud’s account made it seem far less uncomfortable than it had been.

Veronica turned the page to the next entry and shuddered. “This one is bad. Okay, November seventh, 1989—Ghost stopped. Keep an eye on Jason’s girlfriend, very powerful.” She grimaced. “Wow, he even underlined it. How nice.”

“That was really interesting,” Chandler said, “And by interesting I mean kind of disturbing, but it doesn’t really offer us much of a plan. We still might be looking at an apocalypse.”

More silence greeted this statement. Hearing his father’s apathetic words had helped clear his head a little, but he still couldn’t quite process everything that had happened the day before.

His father was dead.

Garnet had died to buy them a few of days.

They were stuck having to stop yet another apocalypse.

He pulled Veronica into a hug, surprising her and nearly toppling her into his lap. “I don’t know if I can do this, Ronnie,” He whispered into her hair, voice shaking.

“Now really isn’t the time,” Chandler snapped.

Duke cut her off with a glare. “Shut up, Heather. Let him freak out if he needs to.”

Chandler opened her mouth to reply, but Veronica glared her into silence, moving out of JD’s arms to do so. She stayed close, leaning into him and resting her head on his shoulder, but she picked the journal up again.

“We can deal with this,” Mac said, sounding like she needed to convince herself.

“Yeah, if we had any idea how to deal with it, we absolutely could. Except we don’t, Heather.” Chandler was clearly reaching the end of her rope; they all were.

Veronica was to be the only one who was slightly calm. Even Duke—who could always be relied on to keep it together in a crisis— looked ready to snap.

“Garnet stopped it,” Veronica said, realization dawning on her face. “She tossed herself into it and is using her strength to keep it closed, so soul strength can close it.”

“Temporarily,” Duke cautioned. “Don’t start talking about self-sacrifice or some shit.”

Instinctively, JD put an arm around Veronica, holding her where she was.

She patted his leg with a small smile. “That’s not what I meant. I just mean, if that worked, then we have to find a way to give it enough, constantly, to keep it closed.”

“So it’s not just a matter of all of us giving a little?” Chandler offered, looking disappointed.

Veronica shook her head. “I think it needs to be constant, and I don’t know how to do that. We can’t just keep sacrificing mediums to it.”

“Well how does the ward at Westerburg work?” McNamara asked. “I mean, if it works there, shouldn’t it work here?”

“My grandma never went into much detail about how the wards work. I think they were symbols built into the foundations of the buildings, but what the symbols were and how they worked is anyone’s guess.” Veronica sighed and flipped through the journal again, stopping partway through it to stare at something on the page.

“JD… Did your dad ever work with other hunters?”

He nodded, “Yeah, sometimes more than one person ends up on the same job. He didn’t exactly make friends, but he kept contact information just in case.”

“Maybe some of these people know something?” She held up the journal, revealing pages of names and phone numbers.

A sick feeling settled in JD’s stomach. “Hunters… they’re not exactly social and I doubt most of them would want to be doing any favors for me. My dad wasn’t exactly welcome in the community.”

“I’m shocked,” Chandler deadpanned, rolling her eyes.

Duke nodded, “He wasn’t exactly pleasant to work with the one time he managed to cooperate with us for a couple hours.”

“It’s not even that,” JD said, “He did something years ago, before I was born, that really pissed off some hunters. Now almost none of them will work with him… _Would_ work with him, I guess.”

“I think we should still call them.” Veronica said, and the whole group seemed to latch onto her decisiveness. “It’s an apocalypse, surely someone would want to help with that.”

Chandler took the book from Veronica and flipped through the paged. “It’s a lot of names…”

“Half of them probably don’t work anymore. We’ll just have to go through the whole list and see who we can get ahold of.” JD glanced at the list with apprehension. The girls were pinning a lot on this plan, but he knew hunters and he doubted they’d get much assistance.

Still, it was nice to have a plan, or at least an idea of something to do, so he said nothing as Duke started to divide the list evenly among them.  

 

He was right about most of the numbers being dead ends. Two hours of phone calls later, only five people had picked up and of those five, only two had offered to come. But they kept calling.

“Yes,” JD repeated for what felt like the thousandth time, “Bud Dean. Yeah, he had a son. Yes, I’m in the business. I’m in Sunnydale, California and there’s something big going down here. If you can come here, that would be helpful.”

Pausing for the other man to talk, JD made eye contact with Veronica who was sitting across the room, taking a break while the three phones were in use. He gestured to his phone and rolled his eyes. Smiling at him, she stood up and crossed the room to join him sitting on the floor.

“Yes, I already said this, Bud Dean had a son. Has. It’s me.”

The gruff voice on the other end of the phone growled something to someone he was with, and then spoke louder to JD. “Who’s your mother?”

It was the last thing he wanted to talk about, but for all he knew, some of these people might have known his mom. “Alice Dean.”

“Alice? Alice Larsen? Holy shit, you’re Allie’s boy? Well fuck why didn’t you lead with that? No one in their right mind would do a favor for anyone associated with Bud, but there’s not one of us who wouldn’t have dropped everything to help Alice. I was real sorry to hear she’d passed. I’ll call the people I know and see who can get to… Did you say Sunnydale?”

Shocked at this turn of events, JD nodded before remembering that the man couldn’t see him. “Yeah, Sunnydale, California.”

“Goddamn rift towns. I didn’t think that one would be a problem, but you never know. We’re in Sacramento so it’s only a few hours, but we’ll need time to gather some other people. Find a base of operations that will fit a couple dozen people and we’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

“Yeah, we’ll do that. Thank you for your help.” Having managed to stutter that out, JD hung up the phone. He turned to Veronica. “He’s coming and he said he’d call others.”

Once McNamara and Duke had ended their calls, JD addressed the whole group. “The guy I just called, Simmons, said he’d gather some people who might be able to help us. Apparently a lot of people in the business knew my mom.”

“Thank god,” McNamara muttered, twisting her engagement ring anxiously around her finger. “I was really starting to think we were on our own for this.”

“I was ten seconds from calling Jeremy and Michael and begging them to come help us,” Chandler agreed.

Veronica frowned, “We can’t ask them, they’re both too busy with Jer’s wedding.”

“They would have still come,” Duke argued.

“Yes, I know, that’s why we shouldn’t ask,” Veronica snapped.

Chandler sided with Duke. “There won’t be a wedding if the world ends, I bet they would want in on this.”

“We don’t need them!”

Unable to handle the bickering, JD stood up. “Be ready to leave here tomorrow morning. Last night I noticed a place that will hold everyone that we should be able to use as a base.” With that, he turned and left, pinching the bridge of his nose to fight he headache that was threatening him.

Veronica joined him in the other room, but she didn’t seem to be in a talking mood. Content to sit in silence, JD didn’t try to start a conversation. His mind replayed the image of his father’s body floating away over and over again.

Other things started to crowd the image; memories of his father, both good and bad.

It struck him suddenly that he couldn’t remember what the last thing Bud had said to him was.

“I never asked about his eye,” JD whispered, and Veronica turned to look at him. “He lost his eye somehow, and I never asked what happened.”

Veronica hugged him, but said nothing. Her eyes were unfocused and she seemed completely lost in her thoughts.

A strange twinge of something like annoyance hit him. She should have been paying attention. “Veronica?” She should have had something to say. “Veronica?” That time his voice had come out harsher than he’d meant.

She barely even looked at him. “Do you think it was sacrifice, or suicide?”

The question cut straight through his irritation. Garnet. Veronica had been holding herself together for him and the Heathers, and he’d barely even thought about what she must be going though.

“Ronnie…” Now that he was thinking about it, he couldn’t find the right words to say.

“Well? Do you think she did it because she wanted to die?” Veronica’s eyes were wide, almost desperate.

He wished he had an answer for her. “I’ve asked myself that question a lot,” He had, though not about Garnet. “And the only answer is that we’ll never know. She died, and her death will give us the time we need to save everyone.”

Veronica nodded. “I wish…”

“I know.”

Garnet had probably deserved better. At the very least, she deserved a chance to learn to use her powers and to learn they weren’t evil.

“I saw it all,” Veronica whispered. “Her soul, when she left her body and stepped into the rift, I saw everything. She was so scared, JD.” Veronica’s voice broke, and a small, coughing sob escaped her.

He hated seeing her cry. They’d been together for six years, and he still couldn’t stand to see her upset. He pulled her into his chest and rested his head on top of hers. “Ronnie…” None of his usual words of comfort would come. So he stroked her hair and left it at that.

With nothing to offer her, his mind traveled back to Bud, and his mother, and he let himself get lost in memories. Many of them were painful; thoughts of bruises he’d gotten for breaking rules, or the harsh memory of Bud pointing a gun at Veronica, and later at him. Others were complicated; sitting in a diner with both his parents when he was a kid, feeling almost normal, or listening to his mom tell stories while she sewed a symbol onto a coat he’d thought would never fit him.

Veronica was lost in memories too, though he doubted they were her own. He was glad he didn’t have to bear the burden of someone else’s memories along with his own. As always, he admired her strength, even as tears leaked from her eyes.

It was a strange kind of grieving. They weren’t grieving the same person, and JD wasn’t even sure what he was feeling was grief, but it was easier to bear together. They didn’t bother to fight it, instead choosing to get lost in themselves, while simultaneously being an anchor for each other, so that they couldn’t completely drift away.

Tomorrow would be madness and chaos as everyone arrived to offer help. Amid all of that, JD hoped they would find a way to finally finish this.

They’d lost enough.


	12. Family

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who continues to read this, I really hope it's worth it. Enjoy.

The place JD found for them to set up for the hunters was a warehouse that had been converted into some kind of bar or club. At the moment, it was closed for renovations, which they managed to delay with some forged papers. It was a mess, but it was vacant and big enough for them all to stay in one place.

Before the hunters arrived, they set up protections for the place. As this wasn’t exactly Veronica’s area of expertise, she let Chandler and JD take the lead on it. She sat back with McNamara to watch while Duke continued her obsessive reading about wards.

She hadn’t found anything yet, but the last time someone had asked her to take a break, she’d shouted furiously at them. Everyone just wanted to feel useful.

Veronica was focused on feeling for the rift. Distantly, she could sense its energy, and if she focused she could get a sense of Garnet’s strength holding it closed. So far, her strength hadn’t waned and Veronica was confident that they had a couple days to work out a plan.

“Hey, Veronica, can you come help me?” JD called from the other side of the room, and Veronica stood quickly to go to him.

He reached for her hand and held on to it, squeezing slightly. She smiled at him. “What do you need?”

“I just like having you around. That, and I could use a little extra strength for this.”

Veronica returned his smile. “Take as much as you need.”

His grip on her hand tightened and he turned his attention back to the symbol he’d carved into the door, pressing his other palm against it. A wash of something strong swept through Veronica, making her shiver.

“Whatever you just did, it worked and it was creepy, don’t do it again,” Chandler shouted from the upper balcony where she was tying bags of protective plants to the railings.

Veronica looked at the symbol; the same one JD’s mom had sewn into the lining of his coat. He’d used her knife to carve it, drawing strength from the power of such an old, sentimental object. It wasn’t as strong for him as his mother’s ring, but that wouldn’t have carved well into the wood, and there were no windows in this place.

JD stepped back. “I’m glad it worked. People will probably start getting here soon.”

“Are you ready?”

He didn’t ask her to clarify the question; they both knew she wasn’t asking about the building’s defenses. “I don’t know. All these people knew my parents at least by reputation, and technically I’m one of them but… I don’t feel like I really am.”

“You don’t have to be one of them. After this is over, we’ll go back to our station wagon and our shitty diner food and fighting ghosts the way we always have. They don’t have to have anything to do with it.”

JD leaned down to press his face into her hair. “That sounds amazing.”

Veronica laughed and moved even closer, wrapping her arms around him. “Where do you want to go first?”

“Somewhere warm,” He said decisively.

“Florida?”

“No! I meant what I said after the last job, I am never doing another job in Florida, that place doesn’t operate by the ordinary rules of the world.” He was almost laughing, which was a relief to Veronica. She hadn’t heard him really laugh since his father died.

Everything that had happened was stressful, and it didn’t help that it was all happening at the same time. She pulled him into a kiss, just because it was nice to feel normal for a second. He leaned into it, ignoring the complaints of their friends who were in the room.

They broke apart when the door hit them, catching JD on his bad shoulder. The person who stepped was a big man, dressed mostly in denim, with a round, bearded face. He beamed when he saw the two of them; ignorant of the injury JD was now nursing. “Nice to finally meet you in person! I’m Simmons, we spoke on the phone yesterday.”

JD seemed frozen, so Veronica stepped forward. “I’m Veronica Sawyer, that’s JD, and behind us are Heather, Heather, and Heather.”

The three girls approached and nodded at Simmons, who stared at them with poorly disguised confusion. None of them attempted to differentiate between themselves.

Shaking his head, Simmons seemed to decide to move on from them. “I brought my boys with me, they’re dealing with the gear but they’ll be in in a second.” Sure enough, two men who were very like Simmons, though younger, walked through the door. “That’s Junior, and my other boy Mel. We’ve invited just about everyone, but I can’t guarantee that we’ll get many. California’s a bit of a haul for some and since we think it might be the end of the world, some of the guys want to spend it with their families.”

“Understandable,” JD said, finally finding his voice. “We’ve dealt with this sort of thing before, but those times had clear solutions. This one… isn’t like that.”

“Clear solutions?” Junior asked.

“The other two times we’ve seen potential end of the world circumstances involved possessed people. Once they were no longer possessed, it wasn’t an issue anymore.” Veronica explained. “This time is different.”

“Twice?” Simmons lifted his bushy eyebrows and exchanged glances with his sons. “Y’all seem a little young to have seen something like that twice.”

Chandler rolled her eyes, shooting Simmons a glare that would have had most people cowering. “We live in a rift town, there were a lot of ghosts.”

Veronica didn’t bother mentioning that the apocalyptic incident in Sherwood had actually been far less concerning than the one that had taken place in Middleborough, which wasn’t on a rift. They weren’t even sure that the ghost that had possessed JD had wanted to end the world.

Simmons and his sons didn’t seem to need more explanation; they nodded and started to unpack their things, setting up a small camp-like area not far from the door. “You’d best get ready, the ones that are coming should be here soon, and they’re all eager to meet Allie’s son.” Simmons looked at JD, “I gotta be honest, you aren’t what I was expecting. You look too much like your father, they won’t like that.”

JD bristled, and Veronica reached for his hand, uncurling his fingers from the fist he’d wrapped them in. Breathing deeply, JD spoke. “Do you mind telling me what he even did?”

Suddenly, Simmons—who had previously been open and expressive—looked away from them, shuffling his feet and glancing back at his sons. “That’s uh, not really my business, son, I’m sure someone else’ll tell you.” He became engrossed in unpacking a bag, turning his back on both JD and Veronica.

“That was weird,” Duke said, pointing out the obvious and doing nothing to decrease Veronica’s irritation. JD was tense, and Veronica was barely keeping it together.

 

Things only got worse when the others arrived.

They seemed to come in waves, groups of four or five would show up and set up camp, followed closely by another group, time would pass and then another few men would arrive at their door. Soon the club was packed with people setting up sleeping bags and comparing guns or scars.

Veronica was watching it all from the balcony with JD, Duke, and McNamara.

“I hate men.” Chandler arrived at the railing fuming, her jaw clenched and her eyes flashing. “I miss my plants and my nice smelling house and my nice smelling girlfriend!”

No one argued with her, or even acknowledged that she’d spoken. They were all too deeply entrenched in similar thoughts. The men that had arrived were all of a certain type. Gruff and intense, wearing clothes that looked like they hadn’t been washed, each complaining of some kind of insult to their masculinity that they’d suffered on the drive to Sunnydale.

McNamara had spoken to two of them before retreating to the balcony; Duke had followed shortly after. Veronica and JD had done their best to corral everyone, sometimes assisted by Chandler. Eventually, one too many cryptic comments about Bud had driven JD upstairs. Veronica had followed him to make sure he wasn’t threatening violence.

All in all, it was completely overwhelming. They’d met most of the men who’d shown up—perhaps forty in total—but the names had started to blur together. Veronica doubted she’d be able to differentiate between Don and Calvin and Curtis and some man whose name was Cliff and that wasn’t even starting on the ones who had strange, obscure nicknames. Simmons had attempted to explain a couple of them, but Veronica had asked him to stop after realizing that she didn’t want to know.

There were also five men who went by Junior. Veronica’s three closest friends all had the same name and even she thought it was excessive.

Heather McNamara was staying hidden behind JD as much as she could; Veronica got the feeling that all of these men were making her nervous, though she hadn’t said as much.

“I’m going to go call Laura,” Chandler said, walking away before anyone could stop her.

Duke pulled a book out of her bag. “I’ll be up here if anyone needs me.” She wandered a little ways down the balcony to a slightly quieter spot and started reading.

JD kept one hand on Veronica’s lower back. “I hope they can help, because I really do not want to spend my last moments on earth surrounded by these assholes.”

Veronica nodded her agreement. “I mean, with all these people here, surely one of them knows something?”

As they were talking, two of the hunters got into a fight, shouting about someone named Diane. Veronica’s confidence was dropping by the second.

“We should have just tried to fix this ourselves,” She muttered, looking at the two men who were still engaged in an aggressive wrestling match.

“Shh,” McNamara hissed, “Those two guys below us are talking about us.”

They tastefully avoided lying down on the balcony to get closer to the conversation, but all of them leaned down to be able to hear better.

“I have to say, I’m surprised by the Dean kid.” A man spoke, and Veronica thought it was Simmons’ son Mel.

“Yeah,” The second voice was deep, but unfamiliar. Veronica had probably met him, but she couldn’t match a facet o the voice. “Why do you think he settled on that girl? I mean did you see the other three?”

Veronica heard JD grinding his teeth next to her. She reached over and put a soothing hand over his.

“That’s not what I meant,” Mel said, “He’s awful quiet, don’t you think? I mean his old man was…”

JD tensed, and Veronica wondered if they were about to get a hint about what exactly Bud had done.

The second voice spoke again, “Do you think he killed him?”

“Does anyone care if he did?”

“Aw, shit the fights over, we better make sure Cliff hasn’t gotten himself killed,” The voices wandered away, leaving Veronica with no more answers than she’d had before.

Stretch up, JD sighed, “I need to talk to Simmons. I need to know what my dad did.”

“Are you sure you want to know?” McNamara asked.

JD thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t know, but if it means they aren’t going to trust me, we should find out. There might be something we can do about it.”

“I just…” McNamara hesitated, “They get into fights, they call each other names, I’m pretty sure one of these guys slept with that guy’s wife, and they still get invited to this. What could your dad have done that was bad enough that they all hate him?”

Veronica nodded. “She has a point, JD. If it turns out to be something really bad, you may wish you hadn’t asked.”

“It’s not like I can think any less of him,” JD said, and he walked away before they could keep trying to talk him out of it. Veronica followed him, trailing just steps behind him.

They didn’t make it all the way to Simmons. As they were walking, the crowd parted, splitting to make way for a newcomer.

He stood out to Veronica immediately for a number of reasons. He was the only person to have shown up alone, and something about him just commanded attention. All the men in the room stepped away as though royalty had just walked through the doors.

His eyes swept the room, not landing on anyone. When he spoke, he addressed everyone at once. “Where the hell is Bud Dean?”

Chandler emerged, followed by Duke and McNamara and the three flanked JD and Veronica. “Who’s asking?”

The man looked at the five of them. “Where the fuck is he?”

“Dead,” JD answered, his voice expressionless. “What the hell did he do to you anyway?”

Smirking slightly, the man looked at JD, seeming to realize who he was. “Bastard married my sister.”

Chandler gasped, “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw.”

“Please tell me we aren’t bringing that back,” Duke groaned.

“Shut up, Heather,” Veronica hissed, not bothering to specify which one she was talking to. She looked at JD who was staring at the man in silent shock.

The man smiled awkwardly and rubbed the back of his neck. “Nice to meet you, JJ. I’m Xavier.”

“JD,” He corrected quickly, though his face remained blank with surprise.

Xavier glanced at the crowd that was staring at them. “We should… We should go somewhere we can talk.”

Silently, JD nodded, grabbing Veronica’s hand and turning away. Xavier followed them to the tiny office off the main part of the club and locked the door behind them. He turned away from them, politely allowing them a moment of privacy.

JD pressed his face into Veronica’s hair, holding her close. “Do you ever feel like your life is controlled by a capricious god that’s making up the rules as it’s going along?”

Veronica nodded, though she didn’t exactly know what he meant. “It’s fine. We can deal with this.” She smiled up at him, “I’m here.”

He nodded, took a breath and straightened up to face Xavier. “What did you mean?”

Xavier turned back, and Veronica studied him closely. He was tall with black hair highlighted with gray, though he still looked fairly young. When he lifted his eyebrows, Veronica noticed some similarity between him and JD, something about the way expressions sat on his face. It was oddly comforting; this man wasn’t a stranger.

“I’m Xavier Larsen, Alice Larsen was my sister. She was a powerful witch, a gifted healer, and she ran away with Bud Dean about twenty years ago.”

JD sank down onto the desk. “Why didn’t she ever mention you? Why wouldn’t she tell me that I had other family?”

Pausing, Xavier pulled a bunch of papers out of his pocket. “I don’t know. Stubbornness, probably. She… she wanted so badly to be right that she dropped her whole family to run away with—“ He gritted his teeth, “That man.”

“Wanted to be right about what?” Veronica asked, seeing that JD wasn’t capable of forming words at the moment.

“She was a very good healer, but she was obsessed with other forms of magic. Allie wanted to be able to be able to predict the future. We were on a hunt, and my dad humored her, letting her do a runecasting about how it would go. She found it would only go well if someone else got involved. That’s how we met Bud. He was working the same job.”

Xavier paused, studying their faces to make sure they were following him. Veronica nodded for him to continue.

“That night, she did another casting. Something in that told her that she should get to know Bud. A few months later we found out she was pregnant. My dad was furious and told Allie she couldn’t see him again. She ran away with him the next day. That was the last time I saw her. It was just letters after that, once or twice a year I’d get a letter from her telling me about you. The last one I got was—“

“Twelve years ago,” JD interrupted. “She got possessed and walked into a building that was about to blow up.”

Xavier swallowed hard. “I knew she’d died, word got around eventually but… I never found out how.”

Veronica put a hand on JD’s shoulder, and he leaned into her.

“I still have the letters,” Xavier offered, holding out the bundle of papers, “If you want to read them.” He sounded slightly choked up. “She… your mom really loved you, JJ.”

“Only she called me that,” JD snapped. Veronica squeezed his hand, willing him to calm down.

She hadn’t known that JD’s mom called him JJ. He talked about her so rarely, and she never wanted to push him about it, but it hurt a little to know that he hadn’t mentioned it.

Unperturbed by JD’s anger, Xavier handed him the letters. JD looked down at them, but turned away only second later.

“Ronnie… I can’t—“

She took the letters. “I’ll read them. I can tell you anything you want to know.”

He nodded and turned back to Xavier. “Why didn’t you…”

“Come looking for you? Try to get you away from that asshole? I did.” Xavier raked a hand through his hair. “Your dad moved around, and I could never figure out a pattern for the kind of jobs he took. There were a couple times I ended up in a town just days after you had been there. I want you to know though; we wanted you back. You’re your mother’s son and you’re a Larsen. You belong with our family.”

JD’s eyes flashed, and for a second Veronica thought he might hit Xavier. “I have my own family, thanks.” His grip on Veronica’s hand tightened.

Xavier smiled, “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that. And if she’s half as powerful as I’m sensing she is, you’re following a long standing family tradition by marrying her.”

Veronica stared at him blankly, too surprised to correct his marriage assumption. “What?”

“Most Larsen men have some ability for sensing, using, or amplifying the natural abilities of others, so we tend to gravitate towards powerful women. Your grandmother was a witch, that’s where your mom got it.”

Veronica nudged JD and gave him a teasing smile. “So that’s why you like me.”

He managed to laugh, saying nothing but placing a kiss on the top of her head.

Xavier smiled at them. “Rumor has it you’re a medium, is that true?”

Finally, JD found his voice. “Yes. She’s probably the most powerful medium alive. I didn’t even know that some of the things she can do were possible, until I saw her doing them.”

Xavier’s smile slipped. “Oh… Oh shit.”

“What?” Veronica and JD asked it at the same time, as JD pulled Veronica closer to him.

“Well… I heard that the reason we’re all here is because you need help closing a rift, right?”

Veronica nodded, “Yeah, a girl couldn’t control her powers and she tore it open. She sacrificed herself to hold it closed, but it won’t last forever.”

Xavier dragged his hand through his hair, “Yeah. There’s one recorded instance of a rift tearing open. They got it closed, but… well there’s only one way that people know how to do it.”

“What’s that?” JD asked, and Veronica recognized the dread in his voice, as if he suspected what the answer would be.

“The blood of a medium will close the rift.”

Veronica wasn’t overly concerned. It seemed like such an easy solution. “Okay, I’ll go and bleed a little, that’s not that bad—“

Xavier looked away from her. “No, that… that won’t work. You see… The medium has to die.”


	13. Nobody Dies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is wholeheartedly dedicated to the anonymous person who wrote a whole fic for me and to everyone else who has been so kind during one of the most stressful weeks of my life. Thank you all so so much. This chapter got done because of your kindness and motivation. Enjoy!

JD felt like his brain had short-circuited. He couldn’t wrap his head around what Xavier had just said. There was no way. Not Veronica, and not like this.

She couldn’t die.

Not even to save the world. Though he knew no one—not even Veronica—would agree, the whole world wasn’t worth Veronica’s death.

She stood up and started pacing. “Well, maybe there’s a loophole. I mean, I die all the time; it’s how I enter the spirit world. Maybe if I bleed a little, then leave my body… I mean, that’s blood and the death of a medium, right?”

Xavier’s eyes were so sad it made JD sick. He’d liked Veronica’s plan; it sounded like something they would do, but Xavier clearly didn’t think it would work. “That’s not how magic works. If you want to do something, you have to have energy and intent. That’s why a sacrifice is said to work so well. You die giving all your energy, and intent has to be there or else you wouldn’t kill yourself to accomplish it.”

“Then why didn’t Garnet’s death close the rift for good?” Veronica asked.

JD thought he already knew the answer. “The intent wasn’t there. Like you thought, Veronica. She didn’t… She didn’t really want to close the rift. She wanted to die.”

Veronica stopped pacing and dropped her head. Suddenly, JD saw all the weight she’d been carrying since they’d started this adventure. He’d been a mostly useless mess since his father had called them, and had only gotten worse when Bud died.

Standing, JD crossed the room to wrap his arms around Veronica. He held her close and tried to pretend he wasn’t terrified. She was shaking.

“Ugh, I’m sick of listening like this, let’s just go in,” Heather Chandler pushed the door open and walked into the room. Duke and McNamara stood from where they’d been crouched by the door and followed her.

JD glared at them over the top of Veronica’s head. “How long were you eavesdropping?”

Only Duke had the decency to look guilty. “We weren’t sure you would tell us what happened, but we wanted to know.”

“Then this whole sacrifice thing came up, and were you ever going to bring us into the conversation? Sometimes I swear you two forget you aren’t the only people on the planet.” Chandler was scared, which meant she was acting angry.

“We don’t want you to die, Veronica,” McNamara said.

Duke looked away. “What if it’s the only way?”

“How could you say that?” JD demanded, furious and betrayed. Fighting it down, he chose to make sure Veronica was okay. “This won’t happen, I promise—“

“You’re damn right it won’t,” Veronica said, pulling out of his arms to glare at the whole group. “When JD got possessed, he thought the only way to fix it was for him to die, and I said no. When the world was going to end in Middleborough, JD’s dad thought the only way to stop it was to kill Jeremy, and we said no. Now I’m being told that the only way to save everyone is for me to die. Well I’m saying no again. There is another way, and if these people can’t help us find it, then tell them all to leave and we will save our fucking selves!”

JD stared at her, floored by admiration. “God you’re beautiful.” He could feel power seeping from her, so strong it was almost a tangible force in the room.

“Do you think he knows he said that out loud?” Chandler asked, a smile cracking her granite-hard face. “I’m with Veronica. Nobody dies.”

“Nobody dies,” McNamara agreed, brushing a tear away.

Duke looked apprehensive, but JD watched as she schooled her face into neutrality. “I’m in.”

Xavier pulled out a flask and took a long drink. “Alright then, nobody dies. Honestly, JJ, I think I’d rather mess with the apocalypse than your girlfriend.”

“You’re damn right,” JD said, putting his arm around Veronica’s shoulders, not bothering to correct the nickname.

“The problem,” Xavier said, “Is that these guys will be harder to convince than I was. They’re superstitious, and most of them probably came here thinking they were going to sacrifice someone. They will kill you if they think it’ll save the world.”

“But it won’t work if I don’t go willingly, right?” Veronica asked.

“I said they were superstitious, not well versed in theories of witchcraft. They probably think sacrifices work because there’s something special about medium blood.”

JD sighed, the high from Veronica’s speech was fading and the panic was returning. The idea of these men taking Veronica and killing her in some insane ritual to close the rift was driving him insane. “So what do we do?”

“We have to make them leave,” Duke said. “We can’t trust them.”

Chandler shook her head, “There’s no way they would leave. They know the world will end if we fail, and they think we’re a bunch of kids. They’ll insist on staying until the rift is definitely closed.”

McNamara started to add something, but JD stopped paying attention. Veronica was staring into space, her face eerily blank. “Ronnie?”

She started and looked over at him. “The rift… I can feel it all the time. Two spirits escaped… they’re in the spirit world now.” Stumbling slightly, she stepped back to sit on the desk, cradling her head in her hands.

“Rifts make powers stronger, an open one could amplify someone like Veronica more than I’d like to think about.” Xavier put a hand on Veronica’s forehead like he was checking for a fever. “Do you know where you are?”

“I’m in the club, in the office. I can see where I am, but all of you look strange.” She paused, studying each of them in turn and when her eyes settled on JD he shuddered. The depth of her eyes had always fascinated him, but now it was too much. It didn’t look like she was really seeing him at all.

“I can see your souls,” She whispered. “I can’t make them go away.”

JD reached for her and was relieved when she didn’t pull away and buried her face in his chest. He looked at Xavier over her head. “She was fine before, why is this happening now?”

Veronica turned her head so she could speak. “I was feeling for the rift, trying to make sure we weren’t running out of time. I think… I think I let it in too much. When I was talking before, I felt so strong… Now it’s just… overwhelming.”

“That was you?” Xavier asked, and JD heard a note of fear in his voice. “Jesus. I felt it but I thought it was from the rift or something. Christ that’s a lot of power. I was sensing her before, but this… She has more power than people are meant to.”

JD tightened his grip on Veronica, remembering the wave of power he’d felt before. He’d thought it was a good thing. “What do we do?”

“There’s not much to do, honestly. Veronica, if you can avoid it, don’t use your powers, they’re overwhelming you as it is but giving into them more could be dangerous. Can you see us now?”

Veronica turned to Xavier and tilted her head. “I can see your soul if I look for it, but it’s not as bad as before. I can see you around it.”

“That’s a good sign. Hopefully finishing this and getting you away from the rift will make your powers go back to normal.”

“Hopefully?” Chandler asked, stealing the question before JD could say it.

Xavier rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not an exact science. She’s stronger than anyone I’ve ever seen. Is she a third generation?”

JD shrugged, “I don’t know. Her grandmother was a medium—“

“Her grandmother’s diaries said that her great grandmother was a medium too, and she learned things from her mother. This runs in Veronica’s family.” Duke had read more of Veronica’s grandmother’s diaries than anyone.

Shaking his head, Xavier said, “That’s how things usually work, until there’s an interruption in the line or the powers get diluted rather than strengthened somehow. Again, it’s not an exact science and I don’t know fuck all about genetics anyway.”

Everyone turned to look at Chandler, who shrugged. “I teach high school biology, that doesn’t make me a geneticist. I don’t know how this works either.”

Veronica sighed. “I tried to shut it off, but my head hurts. I can still… it’s still _there._ ” She rubbed her head as if that would make it go away.

“I could knock you out,” Chandler offered, “I make a pretty strong sleeping potion.”

JD was rapidly running out of patience; he could see how much Veronica was struggling. “Can you make something that dulls her powers? We might need her—“

“Or we might need to run,” Veronica interrupted, “And I’d like not to be asleep if that happens.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

Heather nodded, “It’ll take me a couple hours to figure it out. I’m sorry; I’ve just never tried something like that before… I’ll do what I can though.”

Looking at Veronica, JD could see the pain on her face. “Anything you can do would be good. Maybe you should still sleep for a bit, Ronnie. It might help.”

Veronica appeared too weak to fight. “Fine. But make sure you can still wake me up. We can’t trust those men.”

“I’ll do my best to keep them away,” Xavier offered. “My family has been doing this for a very, very long time. We have a lot of authority; they should listen to me.”

Chandler dug through her bag until she found a small glass bottle filled with a reddish liquid. “Drink this, you’ll be out in a couple minutes, but it’s just sleep.”

“It’s not the coma juice?” Veronica asked, a weak smile on her face.

Chandler rolled her eyes, “No, that’s blue. Drink up, I have research to do.” She handed the bottle over and waited until Veronica had finished it to leave the room.

Duke was the next to leave, “I’m going to ask around about the rift. Maybe someone knows something that can help, even if they think we’re sacrificing Veronica.”

JD nodded and watched her go. McNamara was hovering awkwardly by the door, shifting as though she wasn’t sure about leaving yet. “Hey, JD… Um… Do you mind if I borrow a knife? All these guys are making me nervous and—“

He didn’t make her finish her explanation. “Sure, just grab one from my bag, it’s on the balcony out there.”

A relieved smile split her face. “Thank you!” She dashed out of the office, leaving him with Xavier and Veronica, who was starting to drift off.

Veronica reached for his sleeve. “Don’t leave?”

He smiled, leaning over to kiss her head. “Never.” She finally closed her eyes, leaning her head against the desk and falling completely asleep.

Xavier was watching from the corner, though JD could tell he was trying to pretend he hadn’t been. “Do you mind if I stay? I—I’d like to talk to you.”

JD just shrugged, taking a seat on the floor next to Veronica. She still had his mother’s letters tucked in her pocket, but he didn’t reach for them. He didn’t know what he would find there, and he wasn’t certain he wanted to know. When this was over, Veronica would read them for him and help him get through it.

Xavier sat down next to him. “How long have you been together? And also, are you married? I assumed you were but she doesn’t wear a ring, and you didn’t correct me when I called her your girlfriend.”

“About six years, and no, we aren’t married.” He had expected Xavier to ask questions, though this wasn’t what he’d thought they would be about. JD didn’t mind; he liked talking about Veronica.

“How’d you meet?”

“That’s… a long story. I moved to her hometown with my dad because of a job and we went to the same school.”

Xavier frowned. “Doesn’t seem that complicated.”

“It wasn’t, until she broke into my house because a spirit was chasing her. Then Heather put herself into a coma for protection and dragged us both into protecting the wards and then I got possessed and tried to blow up the school.”

Laughing out loud, Xavier said, “Damn, that is complicated.” He paused for a minute before hesitantly asking, “So you got possessed?”

“Yeah. Veronica saved me. She saved everyone, seeing as I almost blew up a high school full of people. Then she kept me alive when I had to live with the shit I did.” He glanced down at her sleeping form, and—as if sensing that he was talking about her—she shifted slightly to lean her head on his shoulder. JD swallowed the lump in his throat forcefully. “I hate seeing her like this and not being able to help.”

Xavier nodded. “You will help. We’ll find a way.”

It was odd, sitting here with a man he’d just met and talking about this, but JD found that he didn’t mind. For whatever reason, he liked Xavier, liked his unquestioning acceptance of the Heathers and Veronica, and even JD himself.

When the silence lapsed into awkwardness, JD finally asked the question that had been pressing on him. “So… what’s your family like?”

Smiling, Xavier pulled out a wallet that contained a couple pictures. One was of two people who must have been JD’s grandparents, standing with a girl and a much younger boy. He didn’t recognize this much younger version of his mother, but Xavier vaguely resembled the one photo JD had ever seen of himself when he was a kid. That was oddly comforting; he’d always hated that he looked so much like his father but now he could see features that he must have gotten from his mother’s side of the family.

The other picture had been taken years after the first; his mother was a teenager and Xavier an awkwardly thin preteen. “She looks happy.”

“She was. We all were, more or less. We all hunt ghosts, though Mom and Dad don’t get out much anymore. Mom is just like your friend, a plant witch. Her garden is legendary and she’s a spectacular cook. Your grandfather collects comic books and gripes about the weather. They’d love to meet you, JJ, if you ever wanted to come visit.”

“It’s JD.” He corrected, though he couldn’t put any force behind the words. The picture Xavier had painted was nice, idyllic even.

“You don’t have to say you’ll come. But… I’d appreciate it if you’d think about it. Mom and Dad were devastated when we finally found out what happened to Allie. I can’t even imagine how happy they would be to finally get to know you. Plus they’ll finally have grandkids and stop asking me to settle down.” Xavier smiled, and JD managed to return it.

“I’ll think about it.” It was the most he could agree to right now.

“Thank you.”

They fell back into silence, which was rudely broken by the wail of a phone ringing. JD grabbed it. “Hello?”

Veronica stirred slightly, but didn’t wake up, and JD made a note to compliment Heather on the potion.

“Hey, JD?”

“Jeremy?” JD was happy to hear his friend’s voice on the phone, though he wasn’t sure why he would be calling.

“Hey,” Jeremy repeated. “Michael found something online about a bunch of ghost hunter people getting together for an apocalypse, so he called Heather to make sure everything was fine. Her girlfriend told him that you guys were already taking care of it and she gave us this number to get in touch with you. Is… is everything okay?”

“Don’t worry, Jer. We’re taking care of this. We’ll save the world and be back in time for your wedding.” He wished he felt as confident as he sounded.

The relief in Jeremy’s voice was audible. “Of course. There’s no one I trust more. I mean, you guys have experience with this kind of thing. Thanks, JD.”

“You’re welcome. Say hi to Michael and Christine for me; we can’t wait to see you guys.”

“Yeah, absolutely. Tell Veronica I said hello.” Jeremy hung up the phone and JD was glad the conversation was over. Jeremy’s happiness was palpable in every word he said, and it could be a little unbearable.

“Who was that?” Xavier asked.

“Jeremy. He’s a friend of ours, though he’s basically a brother to me at this point. He got possessed and we saved him.” JD wondered if he should give Xavier more detail about everything that had happened at Middleborough and decided there would be more time later.

Xavier nodded, “And he’s getting married?”

“Yeah, I’m going to be in his wedding. You should come; you’d get to meet everyone. Heather, Heather, Heather, Veronica and I are the main group, but Michael helps a lot too, and Jeremy stays in touch.”

Xavier smirked a little bit. “I’ll meet your family if you meet mine.”

JD glanced down at Veronica and thought about it for a minute. “Deal.”

The smirk grew to a full smile. “I’m really—“

A knock on the door interrupted him. Simmons walked in. “You’re needed outside.”

JD started to say that he couldn’t leave Veronica, but thought better of it. It would seem suspicious if it looked like he was guarding her. She shifted when he started to stand up.

“I’ll be right back, darling, don’t worry,” He whispered, kissing her head and standing up to follow Xavier and Simmons out the door.

It was an ambush. Four guys seized JD as soon as he was through the door, and he could see that they had done the same to Xavier. JD fought them, twisting and kicking and shouting until someone put a hand over his mouth.

“You’d better stop that, son,” Simmons said, gesturing to the side where each of the Heathers was being held captive. Chandler and Duke had pure, terrifying fury in their eyes, but McNamara was shaking and crying.

JD stopped fighting, twisting just enough so he could talk around the hand on his mouth. “Don’t hurt them.”

“We aren’t going to,” Simmons said. “We just need the medium, then we’ll let the rest of you go.”

Xavier spoke before JD had the chance to. “You’re an idiot if you think murdering that girl is going to do any good. She’d have to do it willingly, and she won’t. We’re going to find another way. There _is_ another way!”

“Shut up, Larsen. This isn’t your fight.”

“The fuck it isn’t,” Xavier shouted, “That’s my nephew, he’s one of us!”

Simmons wasn’t moved. “You met him today and he’s Bud Dean’s son. He’s not one of you, and the girl certainly isn’t. Just let this happen.”

Xavier was obviously ready to shout something back, but the whole crowd shifted and turned. The hand came back over JD’s mouth, which held back his scream when he saw Veronica walk into the room.

She looked groggy and her eyes were unfocused. “What’s…” She froze when she saw the Heathers and finally JD, all held captive. “What’s going on?”

Simmons approached her slowly but kept his distance. “We’re going to close the rift, and you’re going to help us.”

“No, I won’t,” Veronica said firmly, “And it won’t work if I don’t do it willingly.”

“You’ll be willing,” Simmons said, a sick smile crossing his face. He pulled a knife out of his pocket.

JD twisted again, freeing his head just enough to shout, “Don’t hurt her!”

Simmons laughed. “I’m not going to hurt her, that would waste all that good medium blood we need. No, I’m going to hurt _you_. That should make her want to help, shouldn’t it?”

Xavier also pulled himself free a little. “If you do this you’ll be making a powerful enemy, Simmons. You should know better that to piss of the Larsens!”

“I’d rather do that than let the world end, Xavier.” Simmons turned to Veronica. “So, what’s it going to be?”

She was clearly panicking. Her eyes kept darting to JD. “I—I…”

If she answered him, the words were lost. At that moment, Heather McNamara drove a knife into the leg of the guy holding her. Tearing herself away as he screamed, she stabbed the man holding JD in the arm. He was free.

Seeing that he was losing his leverage, Simmons ran towards Veronica.

She flinched back, holding her hands up.

She pressed one palm into Simmons’ chest.

He fell to the ground. Dead.

Suddenly, the chaos died away. Everyone stared at the body in the center of the room and at the girl standing over it, shaking. Her eyes moved around the room, unseeing.

JD took a step towards her but Xavier put a hand on his arm. “JD, I don’t think she’s seeing us. I think using her abilities set her off, she might do that to anyone who gets too close.”

Shaking him off, JD moved forwards slowly. “Veronica wouldn’t hurt me. She knows me. She’ll always know me.”

It was a lot of faith to put into one statement, but he believed it completely. Even if Veronica couldn’t see him, even if she was half in the spirit world and seeing people’s souls, she would recognize him.

He approached her step by step, until he was directly in front of her. She didn’t seem to realize he was there. “Ronnie, darling? Come back to me. It’s okay. I’m here. We’re safe.”

Her hand came up and for a second he thought she was going to remove his soul as she had Simmons’.

But then she blinked.

“JD?”

JD let out a breath. “Yes. Yes, it’s me. You’re okay Ronnie.”

Veronica fell forward into his arms and they held each other like the world wasn’t about to end.  



	14. The Rift

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this really made me feel like myself again, I finally feel like I'm over all of the shit from last week. Thank you so much to everyone who's still reading this, I really appreciate it. Enjoy!

Veronica pulled away first. They were standing next to a dead body and surrounded by people who wanted to kill them which was hardly the most romantic location, and she was still a little out of it. Though her vision had gone back to normal, she still felt strange. Her connection to the spirit world was far stronger than normal, like she was being pulled towards it.

It didn’t help that she wanted to go.

“JD… I need to bring him back.” She looked up, hesitant to see the look in his eyes.

As she’d predicted, he wasn’t pleased. “No. He attacked you— all of us— first; he doesn’t deserve a resurrection. Plus, you don’t know what’s happening in the spirit world with the rift open, you might get stuck or something.”

“I have to go. I know you’ve come to terms with shit you’ve had to do, but I’m not there yet. I can’t just kill someone and leave them that way. And… I think it might be good to get an idea of what’s going on in the spirit realm, it might help us fix this.”

JD’s eyes remained skeptical. “Veronica, this could be dangerous.”

Reaching for him, she squeezed his hand, “I promise I’ll stay away from the rift. I’ll just get him and come back, no big deal.”

“And if you die?”

Veronica smiled up at him. “I’ll just keep coming back, I’m stubborn like that.”

“Ronnie, I don’t know… And you’re already dead. Please be careful.”

With her body abandoned on the ground, Veronica looked at him as a ghost. “Just keep my body safe; I’ll be back soon.”

She stepped into the spirit world. Passing through the thin barrier was like exhaling, and the smoky world of the spirit realm embraced her.

Everything felt slow and sinking, she passed by it with no urgency. Ghosts watched her, but didn’t speak; those that recognized her for what she was walked behind her.

The energy coming from the rift was palpable, even though Veronica didn’t think she was close to it. Space worked differently in the spirit world, and sometimes things got strange. It was so difficult to keep herself from wandering towards it. The energy was strong, and something about it was drawing her closer.

“I need to find Simmons.” Speaking aloud broke the eerie peace and pulled her out of the trance that the rift had put her in. Now settled in her mission, she moved forward again, this time positive that she wasn’t getting closer to the rift.

Looking carefully through the smoke, Veronica saw a loose spirit eyeing her, its eyes far brighter than anything dead had the right to be. It didn’t approach her, and she didn’t attempt to fight it, though part of her certainly wanted to.

“Has anyone seen someone called Simmons? He died very recently.” Addressing ghosts in the spirit world was risky; they tended to scatter when someone spoke aloud in this strange, silent world. This time, however, it paid off.

A ghost stepped forward, a small girl with a narrow face and wide, glittering, dark eyes. After studying Veronica for a long second, she said, “He’s by the rift.”

Dread settled in Veronica’s mind. She would have to break her promise to JD in order to bring Simmons back. Though she hated the idea of it, she knew she was going to. The death on her conscious was eating away at her, and she needed to fix it.

“Show me the way.”

The girl nodded, taking Veronica’s hand and walking with her. It was comforting to not be alone in the spirit world; though Veronica missed the time she had done this with Heather and Martha. It was easier to walk through the otherworld when you were with friends.

The rift loomed ahead of them, appearing through the smoke suddenly and Veronica wished she had her body so that chills could run down her spine. The feeling of _needing_ that creepy sensation was far worse than actually having it.

As she got closer, Veronica realized that loose spirits surrounded the rift, all pushing against Garnet’s barely visible soul.

“Garnet!” Veronica rushed towards her, scattering a couple spirits.

Garnet didn’t lift her head, and Veronica got the impression she didn’t have the strength to do anything other than stand there. The girl who had led Veronica here left her side to stand next to Garnet.

The spirits all turned to Veronica. Their forms seemed more solid in this realm, less smoke and more steel. Simmons emerged from among them.

“What are you doing here? Did they kill you? Why do you look so strange?”

Veronica had forgotten that she looked unusual in the spirit world. Ghosts were mostly drained of color here and everything else was gray and black, but her soul strength kept Veronica vivid. Some ghosts found it off-putting.

“I came to take you back. I can bring you back to life if you come with me.” Veronica held out her hand, confident that Simmons would join her.

He didn’t reach for her immediately. “You have no idea how the world works, do you girl?”

“Excuse me? I came here—“

Simmons cut her off. “You came here because you have no respect for the natural order of things. You think you can bend the world to what you want, bring people back to life because you wish you hadn’t killed them. Well let me tell you something I’ve learned in forty years of ghost hunting: The dead should stay dead.”

“You don’t have to die, though,” Veronica insisted. “You can just come back.”

“When you called, I thought you knew what would have to be done, and I admired your bravery. Then I realized you had no idea, and I would have to… talk you into it. You’re a selfish, idiotic kid with no respect for sacrifice.”

“Yes, I am, when the sacrifice isn’t necessary. There’s another way, we’re going to find it!” Something about Simmons’ intensity had rattled her though. Was it possible… For the first time, Veronica wondered if she might be wrong about finding another way.

“You won’t. You’ll kill the whole world.”

“I… I won’t. If it comes down to that, if that’s the only way, I would die to save everyone.” Veronica wasn’t sure that she believed her words. She didn’t want to die, not for real anyway.

Simmons seemed to pick up on her apprehension. “You’re lying. You’re a scared little girl.”

“Maybe,” Veronica said desperately, “But I would do it!” She sounded too defensive and shrill.

Scoffing, Simmons turned back to the rift. “I’m done with you. Go back to your life.”

“No! I’m here to bring you with me, so come on.”

He laughed, glancing back at her over his shoulder. “The dead stay dead, including me. You should know better than to mess with that kind of power.”

“But…”

“Someone should have taught you to respect the natural order of things, maybe then you wouldn’t struggle so much with your sacrifice. Everyone dies, Veronica. If you understood that, you would see that your time has almost come.”

As much as she wanted to shout at him, wanted to demand that he take his words back, she knew she would never convince him of anything. So she nodded and turned away.

The loose spirits had stood around them throughout their conversation, but now that Simmons no longer stood near her, they began to approach.

Garnet, drained and barely visible inside the rift, lifted her head. “Run.”

Veronica didn’t argue. Spirits advanced on her, some managing to swipe their horrible claws through her weightless form.

That was when the real fight started. Locked in a battle to end the spirits once and for all, Veronica was giving as much strength as she could. On several occasions she’d had to fight two spirits at once like this, but never so many.

But she had promised JD that she would be okay, and that thought gave her enough strength to push through. She didn’t fight all of them, but she fought enough to get herself free. Once she was no longer surrounded, she stepped out of the spirit world, appearing again in the club where JD, Xavier, McNamara, and Duke were surrounding her body, holding weapons.

As always, rejoining her body was disorienting, but it no longer freaked her out as much as it once had. She sank into herself and let some time pass before she forced herself to breathe and move. When she was certain she had full control of herself, she opened her eyes and sat up.

JD pocketed his gun and fell to his knees beside her, “Ronnie, are you alright?” He didn’t wait for her to answer before he hugged her.

“I’m fine, JD. I’m alive.” With his help, she stood to address the crowd. “Simmons chose not to come back with me. He believed that the dead should stay dead and he was no exception. I understand that many of you probably hate us now, and you are not required to stay. Those of you who choose to remain her to help need to understand one thing: I am not going to sacrifice myself. I am here to find a way to save the world, and no one has to die for that. If you don’t believe the same thing, get out.”

There was a very long silence. Xavier pulled out a flask and took a drink before staring around the room. “Well, you all heard her. If you want her dead, get out. If you don’t, you can stay and help us.”

Several people shuffled towards the door. Once they had started, others followed. Veronica watched as more than half the room left. Many of them were muttering things about wanting to be with their families at the end of the world, others were silent, glaring at Veronica.

Simmons’ words were burned into her head, but she tried to push them away. These men could believe she was selfish all they wanted, but she refused to believe the only way to get out of this was for her to die.

She wanted to live.

When the mass exodus had ended, Veronica stared at the men who remained. “Thank you all for staying. What I need you to do now is read, talk to each other, call other people. Find out everything you can about rifts and wards and anything that might be able to help us. We can find a way.”

Veronica turned to JD. “We should do the same thing.”

“I know, but I need to do something first.” JD pulled her into a kiss. “I was worried about you.”

“You were right; I shouldn’t have gone. Simmons refused to come back with me and there were so many loose spirits. I’m exhausted.” Veronica rested her head on his chest, trying to pretend that a few of the hunters that remained were watching them curiously.

JD was also ignoring them. “Do you need to sleep again?”

“No. The advantage of being weak is that I can’t feel the rift anymore. I shouldn’t lose control again.” Her vision was fully back to normal, and she felt far more stable than she had earlier.

“Okay. Heather is still developing a potion to help you. You can use that if you start getting your strength back.” He kept one hand on her back as they walked away from the center of the room, taking refuge on the balcony.

They watched Duke, McNamara and Xavier go into the office, where Veronica assumed Chandler was working on her potion.

“Why were you all standing around me with weapons when I woke up?”

JD sighed. “Once you were dead, someone suggested tossing you into the rift to see if that worked. Heather pulled out her knife and told them to try it. Heather had her gun hidden somewhere and she pulled that out. Xavier had an extra for me. Once they realized we would all fight for you, they backed down pretty quickly. I think Simmons gave them all the idea and once he was gone, they were ready to give up.”

“Simmons really believed that my death would save everyone,” Veronica said, trying to keep her voice casual.

He saw right through it. “Don’t talk like that, Veronica. He was wrong. There’s another way, and we are going to find it.”

There was so much confidence in his voice, and it helped Veronica shake away some of the dark thoughts Simmons had planted in her head. “Of course there is. We always find the other way.”

“Our love is god,” He whispered in her ear before leaning down to kiss her softly.

Those words had carried them through one apocalypse, and they would carry them through this one. Her confidence restored, Veronica pushed away all thoughts of sacrifice and kissed him back.

They broke apart moments later. “This is weird,” JD said, “Why are they staring?”

“They’re creepy?” Veronica suggested, leaning her head on his shoulder.

“That they are.”

After a long minute of sitting together in silence, Veronica stood up. “We need to go help.”

Though he heaved a reluctant sigh, JD stood and walked to the office with her.

As soon as they were inside, Chandler shoved a glass into Veronica’s hand. “Drink this.”

Veronica downed it without hesitation; she was scared for the moment she started to feel the rift again. It tasted bitter and strangely spicy, but the feeling that washed through her was one of relief. “I think it worked.”

“Of course it did, I’m a perfect witch.”

Duke rolled her eyes. “Good, can you use your perfect witch powers to help me? I’ve been reading everything I can and my brain is about to drip out my ears.”

“I thought that happened years ago?” Chandler asked with faux sweetness.

Without looking up from her book, Duke said, “Shut up, Heather.”

Everyone picked up a book and started flipping through it. Veronica tried to keep her mind on the text in front of her, but she kept losing focus and thinking about Garnet.

“She’s getting so weak,” The words were out of her mouth before she thought about whether she wanted to say them out loud.

McNamara glanced up, “Who’s weak?”

“Garnet?” JD asked, worry creasing his forehead.

Veronica nodded. “I saw her in the spirit realm and she was barely there. I don’t think we have much time left.”

“All the more reason to keep working,” Xavier said, his face grim.

They fell into a tense silence, punctuated by the turning of pages as they continued to work.

“Can I take a break?” JD asked nearly an hour later.

McNamara sighed and rolled her eyes, “I guess that means Veronica is taking a break too?”

“Just let them go,” Chandler said, “It might be the last night of our lives.”

“Come back soon,” Was all Duke had to say.

JD took her hand and led her outside, where they found a seat on a pile of packing crates. “Are you alright?”

Veronica looked at him, a million answers waiting on her lips but not coming out. “No.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“The last thing I said to my parents was that they were idiots. If the world ends, they’ll never know that I was trying to stop it. They’ll never know that I really wish they would believe me if I told them the truth so that I wouldn’t have to keep lying and avoiding them. It kind of bothers me.”

“The world isn’t going to end, Ronnie. We won’t let it. And once this is over, we can talk to your parents and try to make things better, if that’s what you want.” JD wrapped his arm around her shoulders and she cuddled into him.

“I only feel bad about it because the world might be ending, normally I wouldn’t care.”

JD sighed, looking away from her. “Can I be honest?”

“Sure.”

“I hope you can work things out with your parents. I know there’s a lot of stuff there, but I think you could bring them around. You deserve to have your parents in your life, and I know you like them, even if they are pretty ridiculous sometimes.”

She hadn’t wanted to admit that she still cared about her parents because they had said so many nasty things about JD. Of course he’d known how she felt. “Yeah… maybe we can both work something out with our families?”

JD’s jaw dropped. “What do you mean?”

“Xavier and his parents. Maybe you could try talking to them? If you want to, I mean.”

“I invited Xavier to Jeremy’s wedding, I’ll talk to him there and see where it goes. Maybe someday I’ll visit his parents’ farm and meet them. Maybe.” He fidgeted, wringing his hands and dragging them through his hair.

Veronica smiled and took one of his hands in hers, slowing his movement. “Okay. If the world doesn’t end we’ll try to make connections with our families.”

“Together,” He said.

“Yes, of course. Together,” She agreed with a small smile.

He kissed her, and she let herself just enjoy that, pretending this was nothing more than another hunt.

When he pulled apart, he looked into her eyes, searching for something. “Is there anything else you want to talk about?”

Their hours of fruitless research had brought back Simmons’ words about sacrifice, and her own dark thoughts, but she knew better than to tell him about that. “No, just the obvious stuff.”

He nodded, “Okay.”

She leaned in this time, ready to get lost for a little while, but the door swung open before she could kiss him.

Heather Duke stood, silhouetted by the bright lights from inside. Her eyes were wild and her breath was harsh and rapid. “Guys, come inside. NOW! I found it?”

“Found what?” Veronica asked stupidly, confused by her friend’s sudden appearance.

“I found a way to save us all. I found a way to close the rift.”


	15. Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to the four people who are still reading this. Y'all are awesome. Enjoy.

JD followed Veronica and Heather inside, surprised by the nervous flutter in his stomach. It was good news. It meant that he didn’t have to be afraid anymore, and yet he couldn’t shake a feeling of foreboding.

Part of him suspected that Veronica was lying to him about having things on her mind. She hadn’t been right since she’d returned from the spirit world. Of course, trying and failing to raise the dead was probably something you needed time to recover from.

They reached the office, where Xavier, Heather, and Heather were sitting almost exactly as JD and Veronica had left them, surrounded by spellbooks and loose sheaves of paper with archaic markings. The only difference was the new air of excitement and the slight smiles on tired faces.

Duke’s smile was the widest. “I think I found a way to close the rift and keep it closed. I mean, Xavier helped.”

“It was Heather’s idea, I just had some specific knowledge.” Xavier reached behind him and handed JD a book.

He scanned the page, eying the strange markings in the margins. “Can someone explain this to me in the simplest terms possible? It’s been a long day.”

“I got the idea from Veronica’s grandmother,” Duke explained. “She wrote in her diary about the wards and how they work. They feed off of energy and emotions from people, that’s why she chose to put them in a school and a hotel. Hundreds, thousands, of people pass through those places, running the whole emotional spectrum on any given day. They’re perfect sources of energy.”

“So,” Veronica said, picking up her grandmother’s diary and scanning the page, “We’re creating energy from people’s emotions. But how will that keep the rift closed?”

Xavier smiled. “That’s where I come in. What we need is a protective rune layered underneath one that’s used to gather that kind of energy. With both working together, we should be able to close the rift, as long as we have enough people to power it at first.”

“There are about twenty men out there who’ll be able to help with that; the end of the world tends to make people emotional,” Chandler said grimly.

Heather McNamara put up her hand like she was in a classroom. “How are we going to make the rune? Weren’t the ones in Sherwood built with them?”

“Yes,” Duke said, “But there are other ways, right?”

Xavier nodded, “Yes. Carving, sewing, and even just drawing, all work well enough. We don’t have the time or resources to build it into the foundation of the building, and the floor is stone so carving won’t work either. We’ll probably just paint it, and if we need to we can go back over it with something more permanent later.”

“As long as no one can scrub the floors and end the world after we’ve saved it, I’m fine with anything,” JD said.

Veronica was strangely quiet through all this, and JD could tell she was lost in thought. Part of him wanted to ask what she was thinking, but he left it alone. They all had a lot on their minds.

“I’m going to go out there and tell everyone what the plan is,” Duke said, standing up.

“Tell them we’re going at sunrise. That gives us a few hours to rest and prepare.” Veronica looked tense, but determined, and JD was glad to see some of her strength shining through her eyes.

Duke nodded. “Sunrise it is.”

JD looked at Veronica, “Will you be strong enough by then? The potion is weakening you, but we might need—“

“I’ll be ready.”

“We all will,” Chandler added, “This isn’t just Veronica’s job. We all have a lot to contribute.”

“Heather’s right,” McNamara said, “As a group, we really have a lot of feelings.”

That made them smile, even Xavier. “Someday you guys will have to tell me all your stories.”

“There are a lot of them,” Chandler said.

McNamara laughed. “It all started when JD moved to Sherwood.”

“No.” Veronica shook her head. “It started when I used a ghost to get blackmail material on Heather. I found out she was a witch and used her so I would have friends.” She looked around the room, lingering on JD. “It worked out better than I thought it would.”

JD smiled and took her hand. “Personally, I think it started when Veronica broke into my house, or maybe when Heather killed herself.”

“That is slander,” Chandler snapped. “I did not try to kill myself; I knew exactly what I was doing!”

“Sure you did.” Chandler grabbed a piece of paper that had someone’s notes on it and crumpled it into a ball to throw at JD.

He caught it easily and tossed it back, where it bounced harmlessly off Heather’s hair.

Xavier laughed at their exchange. “None of that made sense, but it sounds like a good story. I can’t wait to hear the end.”

Suddenly, the mood turned somber again. If they failed, the story would end tomorrow.

After an extended silence, Xavier stood up. “I’m going to get some sleep. I suggest the rest of you do too. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’m going to sleep in the van,” McNamara said, standing up and stacking a few books before she walked out of the office.

“I need to call Laura,” Chandler said, and taking the hint, JD and Veronica left the office.

They made their way up to the balcony, watching as Duke finished her explanation and went outside with McNamara, presumably to spend the night in the van as well.

Slowly, people began to extinguish lights and conversations died down. JD laid down with Veronica, keeping his arms around her and trying to get comfortable on the metal surface of the balcony.

Time passed and JD tried to sleep. Finally, he gave in to temptation. “Veronica, are you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes.”

He held her a little closer. “Me too.”

Veronica sighed. “We’ll get through this, just like we’ve gotten through everything else.”

“This time feels… different somehow.” JD couldn’t explain it, but something about Sunnydale had felt strange from day one. It had never been an ordinary hunt, as hard as they’d tried to treat it like one.

He felt Veronica nod. “It does.”

“Veronica…” He hesitated, unable to articulate his real fear; that Veronica would still have to sacrifice herself, or that she thought she would. “I’ll be right back.”

Leaving Veronica confused on the balcony, JD wandered downstairs, picking his way carefully around passed out hunters.

The kitchen area was mostly empty, though untouched by the recent construction. Thankfully, no one had bothered to completely clear out the pantry, but JD was still a little surprised to find what he was looking for.

When he returned to Veronica, her eyes lit up. “How on earth did you find that so fast?”

“I got lucky.” He held the bag of popcorn out to her and she happily took a handful. Laughing, JD grabbed a single piece, tossed it up, and caught it easily in his mouth.

Veronica rolled her eyes, muttering “Showoff,” around a mouthful of popcorn.

“You still can’t do that? And here I thought you were some kind of all powerful ghost goddess,” He teased, leaning in for a kiss that tasted a little bit too much like butter and salt.

Never one to ignore a challenge, Veronica leaned back. “Try me.”

Frowning, Veronica tossed another piece and missed again. “I’m hopeless; do you still love me?”

JD reached out and grabbed her hand, suddenly feeling serious. “Always, Veronica.”

“Our love is god.” She picked up on his tone, and didn’t laugh this time.

“Our love is god. No matter what happens tomorrow, it’s always going to be the two of us.”

Veronica didn’t say anything.

They finished their snack with forced humor, and JD was relieved when they could fall silent and settle into a brief, uneasy sleep.

 

JD woke up to the sounds of everyone getting ready. Men standing up and packing, quiet rustles of fabric as people got dressed, and the heavy clangs as Xavier hauled buckets of paint out to the van.

“Ronnie, wake up. It’s time.”

She rolled over, her eyes opening slowly and adjusting to the light. If she had slept the night before, there was no sign of it on her face; she looked exhausted.

Nodding, she stood and straightened her rumpled clothes. “Let’s end this.”

No one was in a talking mood when they were all gathered. There were no grand speeches, and no joking around.

Every person there knew that they might not be coming back.

“We have to go,” Veronica said. “Garnet is getting week; she can’t hold the rift much longer.”

Xavier, the Heathers, Veronica, and JD piled into the van while the other hunters—whose names JD couldn’t remember—climbed into vehicles of their own, and they all set off towards the Sunnydale High.

It was empty, either school was out or it was still too early for students to arrive. JD reached for Veronica’s hand and clung to her as they all made their way to the basement, and then lower, to the dungeon.

Before they opened the door, Duke stopped them. “Does everyone know what they’re doing?”

Chandler nodded. “I’m helping power the rune while you all paint it. Remember to focus on strong emotions: love, anger, fear—“

“Shouldn’t be hard to come up with some fear,” One of the hunters muttered.

Ignoring the interruption, Chandler continued. “Whatever you use, make it strong. Veronica, hold off any loose spirits that come through the rift. JD, help Veronica. Remember, nobody dies.”

Everyone nodded, echoing the words back to her. JD noticed that Veronica remained silent. Sickness twisted in his stomach as he tried not to think about what that might mean.

Veronica stepped forward and pushed the door open. JD could feel her power, seeping unrestrained from her skin as she walked through it and made her way towards the rift.

It was horrifying to look at. A great, gaping hole in the world, full of nothing. Looking at it for more than a second made JD’s head hurt and filled him with an icy cold feeling. It was like staring at death itself.

Faintly, he could see what might have once been the figure of a thin, angular girl, guarding it and holding it shut. She flickered and faded out of existence only seconds after they began painting.

“Garnet!” Veronica called, reaching for the rift, but it was too late. The girl was gone and the rift was open.

“Paint faster,” JD shouted as the first spirit passed through the rift.

It reached for one of the hunters, but Veronica sent it back into the spirit realm before it could sink its claws into him. To his credit, he didn’t flinch; he just kept working on his section of the rune.

The next spirit got past Veronica and made its way towards Xavier. This time, Veronica wasn’t fast enough, and the sound of his screams echoed in the dungeon.

It was over after only a second. Veronica dismissed the spirit and Xavier brushed her off before she could check the bleeding wound on his shoulder. “I’m fine, keep holding them off, it’s almost done!”

The rune was taking shape on the ground, thick black lines making up a design that faintly resembled a very complicated snowflake. It was reminiscent of the one JD still had on his coat, but with more lines. This was meant to do more than protect.

Veronica was still holding off spirits, keeping them from touching people, but doing nothing to protect herself. JD saw the first time a spirit dug its claws into her skin and he was sure he felt her pain. “Ronnie!”

She didn’t even look at him. He wasn’t sure she knew anything that was happening around her anymore; all her attention was on the rift and the spirits that were filtering through it.

They stopped coming one at a time, and JD fought past a couple of them, banishing one or two with abilities he borrowed from Veronica. She banished the one that had hurt her, and now she stood, bleeding and fighting as more and more spirits flooded the room.

“DONE!” Duke bellowed, standing up and stepping inside the rune. The others crowded into it with her, and Veronica and JD joined them. JD held Veronica’s hand that wasn’t bleeding.

Her eyes shone as she looked up at him, “Are they stopping, is it closing?”

JD looked at the rift, which showed no sign of closing. Spirits kept coming through it, but the protective aspect of the rune must have worked, because none of them were getting to any of the people inside.

“We can’t stay here forever,” One of the hunters said, “How long until that thing closes?”

“I don’t know,” Duke said, crabbing her neck to look at the rift.

Chandler shoved closer to the middle of the rune and shouted to be heard. “Focus all your energy on channeling your emotions into the rift. Put as much strength behind it as you can!”

JD squeezed Veronica’s hand tighter, letting one thought calcify in his mind. _I will not lose you._ He focused it on the rune. _Protect us. Protect her. I cannot lose her._

Blood dripped from Veronica’s arm onto the rune as she leaned into him. He could feel her thoughts following his; he could sense the energy she was putting into the rune.

Around them, the emotions and desires of their friends and the hunters were almost as palpable. They were all putting everything they had into making this rune work.

Still it didn’t close. Spirits kept coming, forming a wall around the rune so thick that JD couldn’t see through it.

“It’s not working,” Veronica said, watching.

Chandler shook her head, her famous stubbornness written across her face. “It will work. It has to!”

Veronica shook her head. “The rune will keep the rift closed, but it can’t close it. I can.”

“No.” The word was out of JD’s mouth before he’d fully processed what Veronica had said. “No, you can’t.”

“Veronica…” McNamara whispered, reaching for her friend’s hand. When she pulled away, her hand was covered in blood.

“I can do this,” Veronica said. “I can end this.”

“But you’ll die,” Duke said, gripping Veronica’s shoulders like she could shake some sense into her.

“I know.”

JD let go of her hand, ready to argue, but she reached up and touched his face. “Don’t argue with me, JD. You know it’s the only way. Please, just… please don’t argue.”

“I won’t,” He whispered as he realized what would happen. What had to happen, “If you let me go with you.”

“Never,” Veronica hissed with so much ferocity that the spirits backed away from the rune for a second. “I won’t let you die. I’m doing this so that you don’t die, JD.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to live without you. I won’t live without you, Veronica. We’ll do this the way we do everything. Together.”

“JD, if I can’t save you…”

“What would you do if it were me? Would you let me go, Ronnie?” He brushed his fingers through her hair, ignoring the crowd of people around them.

Veronica couldn’t meet his eyes. “No. I couldn’t let you go.”

“Then this is how it has to be, Ronnie. I can’t save you and you can’t save me, but we can save everyone else. Together.”

Veronica reached up and ran her fingers over the scar he had gotten running from a bomb, hand in hand with her. “Together.”

Though he could see the pain on their faces, none of the Heathers tried to stop them as they parted the crowd and stepped out of the rune.

Even the spirits parted for them, held at bay by the strength of what they were doing.

They stood in front of the rift together, holding hands. Veronica looked into his eyes. “Our love is god.”

He nodded grimly. “Our love is god.”

She kissed him.

And they died.


	16. Mourning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is kinda short, but I know y'all wanted some closure and I didn't want to make you wait too long for it. Enjoy.

Three things happened in rapid succession.

JD and Veronica died.

The rift closed, taking the spirits with it.

And everything became suddenly, violently silent.

Heather Duke couldn’t approach the bodies. She couldn’t even move at first. She remained frozen in the center of the rune, staring at them.

The hunters shuffled out of the way, murmuring about medium sacrifices. Heather had the absurd urge to yell at them, to demand that they shut up, or at least call Veronica by her name.

Veronica. She had collapsed next to JD, still holding his hand. Her face was ashy white and streaked with tears. Something pulled Heather closer to the bodies, as if she needed to touch them to know that they were real.

She hesitated at the last second. She didn’t want to touch them. She didn’t want to feel the hollow emptiness where there should be a pulse. Xavier had come to stand next to her. He studied JD.

“I just found you…” He whispered, kneeling down and brushing some of the hair off JD’s forehead. “I finally found you… God, Allie I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have—”

Heather looked away, unable to bear his grief along with her own. Her eyes settled on Chandler, who hadn’t moved from her place in the rune.

Her gray eyes were hollow as she looked at her dead friends. Slowly, her head dropped, and Heather heard a sound she was certain she would never hear. Heather Chandler, stubborn, stoic Heather Chandler, was crying. She was sobbing, her shoulders shaking and her face getting red and splotchy.

McNamara reached up and patted Chandler’s should carefully, as if expecting the other girl to attack if she got too close. But Chandler leaned into the touch until she was crying on McNamara’s shoulder. The girls held each other and cried together.

Heather couldn’t cry. She wanted to; she knew she should, but the tears wouldn’t come. Instead, she felt a vast, impossible emptiness. She couldn’t imagine a world that didn’t have JD and Veronica in it. She couldn’t picture what her life would be without their regular phone calls and wild stories about their hunts.

Life in Sherwood would be unbearable without them. Life itself felt impossible right now.

“We should… We should get them out of here,” Xavier choked, lifting JD slightly, hesitating when his bleeding shoulder wouldn’t bear the weight.

Moving them was practical, straightforward. A task. Heather liked the idea of having something to accomplish, so she reached down in a pointless attempt to lift Veronica. A hunter nudged her aside and lifted Veronica’s limp form. Her head lolled to the side, and her bleeding arm hung limply out of the man’s grip.

That made it real, suddenly, and Heather choked. She couldn’t remember how to breathe, her lungs wouldn’t take in air, and her vision was blurry. Gagging, Heather dashed to the corner of the room and vomited, retching over and over again.

For a brief, insane moment, Heather thought Chandler would try to make a joke about it, even though she hadn’t done anything like that since JD had…

It all became real again. JD would never step to her defense against Chandler or anyone else again. He would never be too affectionate with Veronica in public again. Veronica would never blush or tease him again.

Never.

Never.

Never.

It settled in Heather’s stomach like a weight, like something physical she would have to carry with her for the rest of her life.

Heather straightened up, fighting nausea as she approached Chandler and McNamara. They stood still, watching as another hunter helped Xavier lift JD.

Chandler suddenly stepped forward, shouting. “Don’t separate them! They wouldn’t want it. You can’t… you can’t tear them apart.”

Xavier’s eyes were sad. “We can’t carry them together, and we need to bring them up. We can’t leave them down here.”

“Oh god…” McNamara whispered. “What are we going to tell her parents? They’ll think they were right about JD; they’ll think he was a monster.”

“They’ll never know he loved her more than life itself,” Heather said, looking at the bodies. “They’ll never know that they died saving everyone.”

“They should know.” Chandler stepped away and let Xavier and the hunters take the bodies upstairs. They brought them to the vans and set them down next to each other.

Goodbyes with the hunters were awkward, and mostly consisted of them muttering thanks and climbing into cars to drive away. Heather was glad to have them gone. They didn’t know JD or Veronica, and didn’t have the right to participate in grieving.

Only Xavier stayed, and no one tried to tell him that he couldn’t. He seemed almost as broken up about the loss as they were, though Heather expected that Chandler would eventually want him to leave; she was jealous over her friends, and prone to lashing out when upset.

Heather would have preferred that to Chandler crying, or the scary blank look in McNamara’s eyes. A long time ago, JD had said “Heather Duke knows how to be calm no matter what the fuck is going on” and she’d never forgotten it. He’d turned her fearful inclination towards hiding her feelings into a strength, a reason to keep her around.

She leaned into that ability now. “Let’s take them back to the bar for now. We can… I don’t know mourn or something for a little while before we decide what to do.” Heather tried to put as much confidence behind her words as she could; they needed a leader, and Chandler clearly couldn’t handle it right now.

Everyone seemed relieved that someone was taking charge. They drove in silence back to where they’d started their day.

Everyone made a point not to look at the bodies.

When they got back to the bar, they had to work together to carry JD and Veronica inside. It probably would have made more sense to leave them in the van, but it seemed too strange.

They ended up sitting next to them, with the bodies just behind them; drinking whiskey that Xavier had found god knows where.

They let stories and memories pour out, as though somehow that would keep them around.

“I thought JD was such a creep when I first met him,” Chandler was saying. “I mean, it wasn’t my fault; literally the first time I ever saw him he was beating the shit out of Kurt and Ram.”

“They deserved it!” McNamara shouted, slurring and raising the bottle she was supposed to be passing.

Heather snatched it from her hand. “He was a good person, even back then.”

“I wish I’d known him,” Xavier said, and Heather handed him the bottle before he could ask.

“He was crazy about Veronica from the beginning, after that fight, I swear to god I saw him wink at her,” Heather said, remembering how she’d thought it was annoying and arrogant at the time.

McNamara snorted. “She broke into his house; he obviously wasn’t the only crazy one.”

“She what?” Xavier asked, choking on the drink he’d just taken.

Chandler laughed, though it was a sad, hollow sound. “She broke into his house running from a ghost, otherwise they never would have found out about each other. She had no idea he was a ghost hunter, he didn’t know she was a medium.”

Xavier whistled through his teeth. “That must have been an awkward conversation.”

Heather took the bottle back from Xavier. He’d had more than the rest of them, and a part of her was getting worried. He wasn’t acting as drunk as McNamara was, but there was something worryingly dark behind his eyes.

It was easier to take care of everyone else, that way she didn’t have to deal with the mixed up mess inside her mind.

Their deaths kept playing over and over behind her eyes. One second they were standing in front of the rift, kissing; the next they were on the ground, lifeless. She couldn’t quite make herself look at the bodies now that they were here. It was too disturbing. They were creepy shells of who they had been. Though she had no powers, Heather could sense the emptiness where her friends’ souls had once been.

She shuddered and took a drink, hoping the burn of whiskey could chase away her thoughts.

“I wish I’d gotten to know them,” Xavier said quietly, letting the moment of levity fade away. “I would have wanted to hear these stories from them.”

McNamara nodded sadly. “They had a lot of stories.”

“They saved a lot of people.” Chandler lowered her head, but her short hair did little to hide her tears. It was still disturbing to see her cry. Heather was fairly certain it had never happened before.

Xavier nodded. They fell into silence as the girls lost themselves in memories and he stared blankly ahead.

Heather couldn’t help the flood of thoughts that crowded into her head. Every single word JD and Veronica had said to her since they’d left for California seemed burned into her mind, but little moments escaped her. She couldn’t remember what color tie JD had worn to prom; she couldn’t remember what she’d said the first time he’d told her what happened to his mother, she didn’t know what he’d said he wanted to do if he ever stopped hunting ghosts. She hated the idea of any aspect of them being forgotten.

“I wish we’d had more time,” Heather whispered. No one answered her, and her words drifted away.

“We don’t,” Chandler snapped, snatching the bottle out of Heather’s hands. Whatever road her thoughts had taken must have been hard on her.

Her anger wasn’t that surprising. Heather had been expecting for a while; Xavier and McNamara seemed taken aback though. Heather still wasn’t in the mood for it. “There’s no need to be rude about it, Heather.”

“Shut up, Heather.” Chandler glared at her, but Heather wasn’t seventeen anymore.

She glared right back. “No, Heather. I know you’re upset, and you’re tired and you’re sad and scared, but guess what? We all are.”

“Shut up!” Chandler said again, this time louder. “You haven’t even cried! Do you even care? Do you not realize that they’re—“ She stopped, unable to say it.

“Please don’t fight,” McNamara muttered, drawing her knees up to her chest. Xavier wisely sat back and stayed out of it.

Tears stung Heather’s eyes and her words came out choked. “Of course I care. They were my friends. I loved them. I just… someone had to keep it together.”

“No, Heather, you don’t have to keep it together! That’s the whole point, nothing is together anymore.” Chandler swiped at her eyes, smearing her makeup even more.

The person in front of her was so different from the usual Heather Chandler that it felt like she had died too. In her place was a woman that cried for her friends and didn’t care that her face was blotchy, red, and covered in streaks of makeup. Chandler always acted like she was made of marble and now the stone was cracking.

Heather reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, feeling the first tear finally fall from her eye. “I’m sorry, Heather.”

The flash of vulnerability disappeared again. “Sorry won’t bring them back, Heather! They’re dead.”

A low groan sounded from behind them. “Did you double check?”


	17. Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it y'all. What you've all been waiting for. Thank you so so so much for sticking with me; I love you all so much and I'll never stop being grateful. Enjoy!

JD was somewhere dark. Though, on further reflection it seemed wrong to say that he was there. He didn’t fell present, and that was probably due to the lack of a form of any kind. On the couple of occasions that he’d gone to the spirit realm with Veronica, he’d looked like a ghostly version of himself.

This was different, now he was just… conscious in the form of a floating cloud the soft blue-gray of cigarette smoke. He was just a soul. Glancing around, he saw nothing at all.

No bright lights. No deities asking him why he hadn’t believed in them. No Veronica.

That was the worst part. They’d done this so that they wouldn’t have to live without each other, and here they were dead but not together.

“JJ?”

Slowly, JD found himself forming into something like the ghostly form he’d been expecting. That made it easier to move towards sound (if it even was sound, everything was strange here and it defied explanation).

The empty nothingness shaped itself into a bench with a woman sitting on it. He felt two opposing emotions rise in him at once as he recognized her. It wasn’t Veronica.

“Mom. What… What the fuck is going on?”

She frowned at him. “Language, honestly Jason, I raised you better than that.”

JD searched for some of the bitterness he’d once felt about the fact that his mother hadn’t really raised him, having died when he was ten years old, but he found none of it. Perhaps such things fell away when you died, though it hadn’t decreased his feelings for Veronica at all.

Still, he didn’t want to spend the first minutes of his afterlife arguing with his mother. “What’s going on?”

“Well… You’re dead.”

That wasn’t helpful. “I know that, I did it on purpose. Where’s Veronica? We died together she should be here.”

That seemed to surprise her; apparently she hadn’t expected his death to be intentional. “People you lost will turn up eventually. And things here will start to seem more real. It’s not so bad.”

It wasn’t exactly the paradise the televangelists had promised, and without Veronica it would always be his version of hell. He sat on the bench next to his mother, dropping his head in his hands when he realized he was now solid enough to do so.

His mom put her hand on his back. “Your fight is over, JJ. It’s time to rest now.”

“Not without her,” He whispered.

She didn’t respond. JD looked around, and saw that the bench was less defined than it had been.

He was less solid too, like he was fading out of wherever he was. His mother frowned. “JJ, you have to accept it. You have to let go of whatever is holding you back there. It’s all over sweetie. Just let go.”

“I can’t let her go. I never will.” He knew that if she were here, he wouldn’t be fighting so hard. He had been ready and willing to accept death if it meant staying with Veronica, but he couldn’t accept an existence that didn’t have her in it.

As if called by his thoughts, a very familiar light appeared amidst the darkness. It was like starlight, blinding and powerful and utterly beautiful.

He recognized it as Veronica’s soul as easily as he would have recognized his own reflection, having sensed it or felt it, and even seen it behind his eyes so many times. It was her.

Everything in the darkened space became sharp again, and he felt solid. His mother stood up from the bench, which was now as clear as day and surrounded by shadowy trees. With her here, JD was content to wait for the rest of the people he loved to join them.

His mother smiled slightly, “That’s it, just accept it.”

“I don’t think we have to, JD,” Veronica said, forming into something like her usual self, but completely transparent. “I think… I think we can go back.”

JD glanced over his shoulder at his mother. “JJ… you’re finally done fighting, your war is over. Just rest now, sweetie. Just rest.”

Veronica smiled gently. “We can stay if you want.” She craned her neck to see around him and wave at his mom. “Nice to meet you,” She said awkwardly.

Biting back a laugh, JD thought about what she had said. It would be so easy to stay here in this quiet place with his mom and Veronica, where they wouldn’t have to keep fighting and bleeding and worrying about all the people they couldn’t save.

It would be easy.

His mom was right that living was a constant fight. All that energy and time and pain, life was a mess. Was that really what he wanted?

But then he thought of the Heathers, and Jeremy, Michael, Betty, and Xavier who he’d only just met.

“I don’t mind fighting,” He whispered, looking down at Veronica. “We have something worth fighting for.” Turning, he tried to apologize to his mother, but the words wouldn’t come.

Somehow she understood him, and he felt himself start to fade away from the dark place. He turned back for one last look at his mom. She was crying and smiling. “Take your time.”

The last thing he saw was her waving goodbye.

 

He was somewhere dark again, but this time he was crushed under the suffocating weight of his body. JD didn’t know how long he had been dead, but in that time he had forgotten how to be alive. He couldn’t breathe. The sound of voices tugged at him distantly.

Heather. It was definitely Heather’s voice, though he wasn’t certain which one. If he could only breathe and see, things would start making sense.

Desperation saved him. Instinct took over and he managed to draw a quick, shallow breath. That helped him understand the words that were being said.

“I’m sorry, Heather.” That was Heather Duke, he was sure of it.

The reply was unmistakably Heather Chandler. “Sorry won’t bring them back, Heather! They’re dead.”

JD hated it when Chandler was rude to Duke, regardless of the circumstances. He let out a groan as he tried to sit up and his bad shoulder protested. He remained laying down. And muttered, “Did you double check?”

He expected them to laugh, to let out a relieved breath and start celebrating. Nothing could have prepared him for the fury of Heather Chandler.

“JASON FUCKING DEAN!” She lunged at him, and he curled into a ball to defend himself as she brought her fist down on his chest, his shoulder.

She stopped when a barely conscious Veronica threw herself on top of him, grumbling something that might have been, “Leave him alone,” but it wasn’t very intelligible. The others pulled Chandler away so they could rest. 

 After a couple hours of sleep, they were sitting in a convenience store parking lot, trying to explain.

“What was it like?” McNamara asked. “Being dead, I mean.”

JD searched his mind and found that, like most of his dreams, only the faintest impression remained. “I don’t really remember. My mom was there, I think. Other than that… it’s just dark.”

Duke smiled and stole one of his potato chips. “I guess you’ll have a surprise for next time you die.”

“We’re never doing that again!” Veronica said, at the same time as JD. The others dissolved into laughter.

Veronica sighed. “I don’t remember it either. I just remember thinking I had something to go back to, like when you wake up before your alarm and you know you’re still going to have to get up, but you’re half asleep?”

“Weird,” Chandler said decisively. She had been rather sullen since they woke up, and JD was trying not to take it personally. They had put her through a lot, and he imagined she wasn’t quite ready to forgive them. She climbed out of the van to go to the bathroom without another word.

“She cried,” Duke said, and somehow that summed it all up. JD had seen Chandler cry once, and he knew how much she hated doing it.

McNamara nodded. “You were dead for so long; we thought you were going to stay that way.”

Veronica blushed. “You moved our bodies! I had trouble finding them.”

JD bit back a laugh while Heather Duke glared at her, “Well we couldn’t just leave you there!”

“So everything worked?” JD interrupted, “The rift is closed?” He knew it was, otherwise someone would have said something, but he wanted to hear about it. He also wanted to avoid an argument between Duke and Veronica.

Chandler showed up at the door. “The rift is closed. You both sacrificed the thing that was most important to you. There’s nothing more powerful than that.”

Veronica nodded and reached for JD’s hand. “Good.”

They were silent for a long time, thinking about the rift. Thanks to the rune, it wouldn’t open again.

“So,” Xavier finally said, “What now?”

A slow smile spread across Chandler’s face, the first JD had seen since they’d come back to life. “Now we head home. We can take our time on the drive and still be back in time for the wedding.”

JD laughed. He’d nearly forgotten about Jeremy’s wedding in all the chaos, but now he couldn’t believe how much he was looking forward to it.

 

Three weeks later, JD collapsed into a fragile wedding chair, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Veronica, we are never getting married. This is an insane workout.”

Veronica, who occupied the seat next to him, laughed. “I don’t think that’s how weddings are supposed to be.”

“Easy for you to say, you didn’t spend the last ten minutes carrying Jeremy over your head in a chair! You couldn’t even reach the chair.” JD reached for a glass of water and downed it.

She glared at him. “I was dancing, it’s not like I wasn’t doing anything, and besides I don’t think we would necessarily be doing that at our wedding.”

JD nodded. “True.” Jeremy’s wedding was packed with people, and nearly all of them were crammed onto the dance floor. He could spot Chandler’s bright red dress in the crowd, with Laura, Betty Finn, Heather Duke, McNamara, and Peter at her sides. Michael had taken JD’s place holding up the chair, and he hadn’t stopped smiling the whole night.

Nothing, however, could have compared to the sheer and utter joy that radiated off of Jeremy and Christine. It was so bright, beautiful, and obvious that sometimes it was hard to look directly at them.

Averting his eyes, JD searched out Xavier in the crowd. One of Jeremy’s aunts or cousins had taken a shine to him earlier in the evening, and Xavier was gamely humoring her with a dance, though he didn’t seem to be enjoying it much.

Behind them, JD caught sight of two people he had not been expecting, both of whom looked vaguely uncomfortable.

“Ronnie… Your parents are here.”

She looked up, startled, and followed his eyes to where her parents were carefully picking their way through the crowd. “Shit. What the hell are they doing here?”

“No idea,” JD said, waving to Xavier. They were going to need backup and the rest of his friends had disappeared from view.

Xavier split away from his partner, giving JD a grateful look. JD was surprised how nice it was to have his uncle around. Though he hadn’t mentioned it to Xavier, he was becoming more open to the idea of meeting his grandparents.

“Veronica, darling! Your friend Betty Finn told us you would be here, and we just had to come see you,” Mrs. Sawyer gushed before reluctantly turning to JD. “Jason.”

It was the warmest greeting she’d given him in a long time. “Mrs. Sawyer, Mr. Sawyer.”

“Call me Jim,” He said stiffly.

Veronica looked at JD, her brow furrowed. This was far nicer than her parents ever were to them. Had someone told them they’d almost died?

“Sweetie,” Mrs. Sawyer began, “We have something we’d like to discuss with you. Oh, goodness, who’s this?”

Xavier had come up behind her. JD was glad that he could only barely tell how drunk his uncle was. “This is my uncle Xavier. My mother’s brother.”

Mrs. Sawyer’s eyebrows arched up. “Oh. I didn’t realize you had any family other than your father.”

No one mentioned that his father was now dead; it would have complicated an already awkward conversation unnecessarily.

“So, Mom, what do you want to talk to us about?” Veronica said, after Xavier had taken a seat next to JD.

After a brief pause, Veronica’s mother spoke. “I… We are very upset about how our last conversation ended. Since then… we’ve done some thinking—“

“And we read some of my mother’s books,” Mr. Sawyer interrupted.

Veronica’s eyebrows shot up and she looked at JD in blatant shock. Before she could say anything, Mrs. Sawyer continued. “Yes. We wanted to talk about… finding a compromise. We have a few terms, but really what we want is to have you in our lives, Veronica.”

Nodding, Veronica reached for JD’s hand. “If you want me to be a part of your life, that means accepting JD. He goes where I go.”

“You have no idea how true that is,” Xavier said significantly, to the confusion of Veronica’s parents.

Ignoring him, Mrs. Sawyer plowed on. “We realize that, and we’re willing to try to start fresh, on one condition.”

“What?” Veronica asked, narrowing her eyes. JD squeezed her hand gently before she could get angry.

Pursing her lips, Mrs. Sawyer said, “We’d like you to get married.”

Veronica flushed bright red, and for a second JD thought she was about to go off on them. He squeezed her hand again. “Ronnie, wait. Is it really the worst thing ever?”

She looked at him. “We’ve told them we don’t want to, they’re ignoring what I want _again.”_

JD nodded. “When we thought we were going to die, you said you wanted to get back on good terms with them.”

Mr. Sawyer reached out and put a hand on Veronica’s shoulder. “We’d just feel more comfortable with your… lifestyle if the two of you were married.”

“So if we get married, you’ll accept that maybe I’m not crazy and ghosts are real?”

“Yes,” Her father said without hesitation. After a brief pause, her mother agreed with him.

Slowly, Veronica nodded. “Okay.”

JD laughed, and hopped off his chair to get on one knee, pulling his mother’s ring from around his neck as he did so. “Veronica Sawyer, our love is god, will you marry me?”

Veronica threw back her head, laughing with him. “Yes, I guess I will.”

He put the ring on her finger, and Xavier slapped him on the back. “Congratulations, JJ, I’m happy for you kids.”

Summoned by the commotion, Chandler appeared from the crowd, flanked by all their friends, even Jeremy and Christine, who had somehow gotten away from their guests.

McNamara arrived first, fuming. “What I think just happened had better not have happened! You were supposed to buy a ring from me!”

“Heather, I’ve been wearing this since I was ten years old, do you seriously think I would have spent money on another one?” JD rolled his eyes, but accepted the hug Heather offered him, even as she rolled her eyes.

Betty smiled at him and stood on her toes to hug him. As she did, she whispered in his ear, “Called it.”

The crowd had pushed Veronica’s parents away, but JD made a point of smiling at them with gratitude. It would take time, but he hoped he could eventually make them like him.

Duke finished hugging Veronica and reached over to him. Christine got sick of waiting and piled on top of them, dragging Jeremy with him. When she pulled away, she was wiping tears out of her eyes. “I’m just so happy! Everything is so happy!”

JD laughed and reached over to extract Veronica from Betty’s embrace. He pulled her close and she hissed in his ear. “This is way too much, imagine what the actual wedding will be like!”

Smiling, he whispered back, “We could always have a really, really long engagement.”

That brought her smile back and she kissed him quickly. “I love you, Jason Dean.”

“I love you too.”

“Enough of that!” Jeremy bellowed, “This calls for celebration!”

He grabbed JD by the arm and yanked him towards the dance floor. JD took hold of Veronica’s arm and brought her with him. All their friends joined until they’d formed a circle and they began a clumsy, wildly enthusiastic dance, galloping madly around each other.

Breathless, JD watched the faces of his closest friends spin around him, catching eyes with the love of his life as she threw her head back to laugh. Everything was wonderful.

It was good to be alive.


End file.
